Mistrust in Cedar Hill Hospital grows in DC's Ward 8

This story was reported with support from SpotlightDC: Capital City Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Terra hoped that her nursing job at Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center would be a chance to give back to the Ward 8 community where she was born and raised. She applied to work at the hospital over 20 times, believing that it would finally bring high-quality medical care to Southeast, where residents have the lowest life expectancy city-wide.

But after a year of working as a registered nurse in the hospital’s emergency department, Terra, who requested that only her first name be used so that she could speak openly about her professional experiences, said she’d never trust the facility with her own medical care.

“If my water break, please put me in a cab to Washington Hospital Center,” Terra said earlier this year when she was pregnant. She said that significant understaffing and insufficient training for medical workers like herself have left her scared for the facility’s patients, and uncertain of whether she’ll return to her job now that she’s on maternity leave.

Cedar Hill opened to great fanfare in April 2025, the same day that Southeast’s previous sole full-service hospital, United Medical Center, closed. That facility had been dogged by financial chaos and accusations of poor patient care — including mistakes as dangerous as failing to take steps to prevent the transmission of HIV from a mother to her newborn, which eventually led to the closure of its obstetrics ward.

Cedar Hill promised a pivot from this dark past, and a new era east of the river.

“Cedar Hill will change the trajectory of health care in our community,” said Mayor Muriel Bowser when it opened last spring, calling the $434 million, 136-bed facility a “first-class hospital.” City Council Committee on Health Chair Christina Henderson called it “state-of-the-art.”

Terra isn’t alone in saying that Cedar Hill has fallen dramatically short of these expectations. The hospital has faced significant scrutiny and patient complaints since its inception — including a citation of immediate jeopardy from the Department of Health related to deficiencies in surgical scheduling and a lawsuit from a woman who says she had ovarian tissue removed instead of her appendix, both according to reporting by WJLA.

For its part, Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center says they’re filling a vital gap.

“Cedar Hill opened to address a longstanding need for greater access to high-quality healthcare in Wards 7 and 8 and across the District,” said Susan LaRosa, the hospital’s marketing, communications, and business development strategist for the region. “As a new hospital, we have continued to build and strengthen our operations since opening — expanding clinical services, growing our workforce and physician network, and working with community partners to improve access to care.”

Now, as Bowser nears the end of her term, she’s requesting an investment of $60 million over six years from the D.C. Council for Cedar Hill’s maternal health services, which have experienced what Bowser described as “steep financial loss” since opening. Maternal and fetal medicine costs are inherently “substantial,” she said, adding that “unlike other hospital services, maternal health care has a significantly longer lead time to financial stability.”

But the substantial financial request, paired with mounting patient complaints, has council members concerned about the hospital’s long-term viability, and in the meantime many east of the river residents feel forced to fend for themselves.

“Groundhog Day every day”

Terra says her concerns about the hospital started in mid-June 2025, shortly after the hospital’s opening and on day one of her new job. Instead of receiving significant training on her orientation day, Terra says she and the other new hires sat in the cafeteria for hours while the D.C. Department of Health met with hospital leadership. The next day, Terra said her nursing duties started.

Her concerns only escalated from there. Terra said that as a result of understaffing, a significant number of patient rooms and entire emergency department zones are frequently closed, sometimes with devastating impacts.

In February, Terra was on shift when she said a man suffered an overdose before he made it to a room. “They had no beds, no nurses, and he had to sit in the hallway,” Terra said. “By the time a doctor got to him, he was dead.”

LaRosa of Cedar Hill denies Terra’s characterization of events, but says that “federal patient privacy laws prevent us from commenting on individual patients, their medical conditions, or the circumstances surrounding their care.”

On some days, Terra said, only one or two nurses report for duty, meaning she’s left doing the work of five nurses.

“We’re not even properly trained in triage, so it’s Groundhog Day every day,” Terra said. “There’s no protocols. It’s nothing set in stone about anything.”

LaRosa says this is “false” and that they have “protocols for emergency department operations and triage,” and that nurses receive appropriate training.

But those seeking care at the hospital have also reported delays, and the facility has struggled to stay fully staffed. LaJoy Johnson-Law is the Ward 8 Representative on the DC State Board of Education. When her daughter Abria experienced severe stomach pain last December, she rushed her to Cedar Hill, the closest hospital to their home in Anacostia. Arriving at 2:30 p.m., she said they sat for more than nine hours in the emergency waiting room without receiving any medication or tests.

Ultimately, she said Cedar Hill staff told her there was nothing they could do, and an ambulance transferred Abria across the city to Children’s National Hospital in Northwest. “This child didn’t get an ambulance until midnight,” Johnson-Law said. “That is unacceptable.”

According to multiple sources, some of the issues stem from chronic vacancies. At a Committee on Health public oversight roundtable on April 6, the hospital’s CEO Kimberlee Daniels testified that there were 67 registered nurse vacancies. Currently, there are 55 job openings on Cedar Hill’s public careers website.

“I have relatives who have gone there, patients are calling me, and we’re now hearing other hospitals complaining about patients coming to them after they’ve been mistreated or not completely treated there,” said Marilyn McPherson-Corder, a pediatrician at the former United Medical Center for over 20 years. She added that she’s never seen problems this bad, despite practicing medicine in D.C. her entire life.

While the District isn’t alone in facing a health care workforce shortage — the Bureau of Health Workforce projects a nationwide shortage of 100,000 healthcare workers by 2038 — Cedar Hill community members said these effects hit especially hard in a neighborhood that’s been historically neglected. Ward 8 faces poverty rates almost double that of the rest of the city, and the average life expectancy for Ward 8 residents is over 15 years lower than that of Ward 3.

"Dealing with a document we did not write"

The George Washington University Hospital runs Cedar Hill with Universal Health Services, one of the largest for-profit healthcare providers in the nation. Universal Health Services operates over 540 healthcare facilities in the country, including the George Washington University Hospital and the Psychiatric Institute of Washington.

For some Ward 7 and 8 residents, the hospital’s problems — including its continuous leadership turnover — stem from this large bureaucracy’s failures to hire from within the community it serves.

When United Medical Center closed and Cedar Hill opened, some providers who worked at the previous hospital thought they would be carried over, keeping their jobs while offering some continuity and community ties to the new hospital. But McPherson-Corder said that she, along with many other providers, lost her job.

“At the last minute, they were told, ‘You’re not invited to the party,’” McPherson-Corder, who is a third-generation Washingtonian, said at a community forum at Baptist Resurrection Church in March. She echoed these remarks at the April 6 roundtable, adding that residents of Wards 7 and 8 are actively avoiding care at the hospital that was supposed to serve them.

“Let me just make sure you’re clear: They’re not going to come to a place that [doesn’t have] a good reputation,” McPherson-Corder said. “They’re not going to come to a place where their doctors have not been invited and is not community-doctor friendly.”

The city recruited GW Medical Faculty Associates to staff the hospital and then in August transferred clinical staffing to Capital Medical Group, which is a subsidiary of Universal Health Services. Staffing issues came to a head when Chief Executive Officer Anthony Coleman ultimately stepped down last spring.

Daniels, who took over in January 2026, described the first year of the hospital’s operation as a “learning curve” at the roundtable, adding that its urgent care has served between 1,100 and 1,900 patients every month since opening. Daniels also said the hospital continues to address the critical staffing shortage.

Councilmember Henderson told The 51st that the city is trying to bring stakeholders together to make sure mistakes don’t continue to compound, but that her concerns are mounting.

“We expected some operational challenges in the first year, as all new hospitals need time to establish stable staffing, culture, and workflows while managing uncertain patient volume,” Councilmember Christina Henderson told The 51st. “But as time has gone on, I have become deeply concerned by reports of consistently low staffing and utilization at the hospital as well as patient safety concerns.”

Henderson says that turnover has been high not only at Cedar Hill but also at many top-level medical positions city-wide, making both accountability and progress difficult.

“Deputy mayor for planning and development? Changed. Head of UHS? Changed. Head of GW? Changed. Head of GW Medical Faculty Associates? Changed. Head of Children’s National? Changed,” Henderson said. “So I want to acknowledge that we are all dealing with a document we did not write.”

Community-led care

While Cedar Hill continues to struggle, and many community members still have the failures of United Medical Center top of mind, some organizers have set out to fill the gaps themselves.

The People’s Pan-African Wellness Front, a Black grassroots organization in Southeast, started hosting free medical clinics at the RISE Demonstration Center in Anacostia in February. Two physicians typically staff the clinic, alongside other healthcare workers, on the last Sunday of every month.

While not a replacement for hospital care, the free clinic provides blood pressure and glucose screenings, hygiene products, and preventive healthcare information in an effort to help address the health disparities that organizers say are at risk of worsening as faith in Cedar Hill deteriorates.

Around a dozen people shuffled in and out of the clinic over the course of an hour on one Sunday in March, with some picking up clementines and granola bars for their kids and others sitting down to chat with the doctors. One pamphlet on a table read, “Health Disparities for Black DC Residents,” and another, “Health is a Human Right: Toward Community Control Over Health.”

Nefta Freeman, a founding PACA organizer, chatted with attendees. Wearing a shirt reading “The Revolution continues,” he said that there’s an innate lack of trust in the health care system amongst many Southeast D.C. residents following decades of systemic harm. “They’ve all been challenged with a health care system that hasn’t been designed for the people,” Freeman said. “The only solution is for us to organize for the people. This is our starting point.”

Freeman said that one of the biggest challenges for the hospital has been the workforce, and that the staffing problem is likely the result of insufficient outreach to an already hesitant community by an institution that many say lacks longstanding local ties or knowledge.

“There’s been a real problem holding onto staffing,” Freeman said of Cedar Hill. “It’s not easy to just plop something down.”

The community clinic hopes to demonstrate what that kind of outreach could look like, while helping residents get preventive care, which can make a huge difference for people navigating chronic illness or the heightened risk of developing it. Residents of Ward 8 are four times as likely to have diabetes as other D.C. residents, for example. “So much of this stuff can save a life, honestly,” said Anoa Gibson-Hunter, a physician assistant at the clinic, as she gestured to glucose tests and a blood pressure monitor.

It was her dad, a Washington physician of nearly 45 years, who recruited Gibson-Hunter to volunteer. Keith Hunter, an anesthesiologist, told The 51st he’s volunteered with PACA the last three years because he wants to see “better health outcomes in the district through the notion of community health [and] health equity.” His longstanding experience working in the local community meant he anticipated the problems at Cedar Hill — and he wonders why the city did not.

Other community health clinics in the area include the longstanding nonprofit Community of Hope and Whitman-Walker Health at the Max Robinson Center. Unity Health Care also has three clinic locations east of the Potomac. Smaller-scale mutual aid efforts have ramped up in recent years too. Like PACA, the DC Health Alliance Network hosts workshops and trainings for community health education, with an emphasis on prevention and generational leadership. East of the River Mutual Aid works on health issues including food drives and community cleanups, which community members can sign up for.

After her first and last visit to the hospital, Johnson-Law, whose daughter was never treated despite her extreme pain, also wondered why the city didn’t see these problems coming — and when they'll finally solve them.

“They need to deliver on their promise,” Johnson-Law said. “They promised the community that they would be able to have care. They’re not receiving care here.”