Nurse Who Started as an LPN Helped Build West Louisville’s First Hospital in 150 Years

She started her career as an LPN. Today, Corenza Townsend is the chief administrative officer of a hospital she helped bring to life in a community that had gone generations without one. Her journey is about more than breaking professional barriers. It’s about what happens when nurses have the opportunity to challenge healthcare systems, influence decisions, and lead change.

When Corenza Townsend wanted healthcare executives to understand why West Louisville, Kentucky, needed its own hospital, she could have presented the statistics.

Instead, she put them on a bus.

Townsend said the nearest hospital was less than four miles away, but for residents relying on public transportation, getting there could take as long as 84 minutes. She wanted senior leaders to experience that trip firsthand rather than read about it in a report: navigating public transportation, waiting at stops, hitting every traffic light, and spending more than an hour to travel a few miles. Townsend called herself a data-driven leader, but she said the numbers had a blind spot: they only reflected “the people who have used our services.”

And that was assuming someone could afford the bus fare, take time away from work, and manage the journey while sick.

“I can show you better than I can tell you,” Townsend told host Jana Price, MBA, BSN, BA, RN, CEN, TCRN, on Nurse Converse, recorded at the 2026 ANCC Magnet & Pathway Conference in Chicago.

For Townsend, the issue went beyond transportation. It was about recognizing the privilege that can shape how healthcare leaders understand access.

“I do not have your started from the bottom, now we’re here story,” she said, explaining that she grew up in a middle-class family and that her own experiences were not necessarily representative of the people she serves.

She offered a personal example: She was able to buy her 16-year-old son a car. If she needed to leave work to take care of a family member, she could do so without worrying about losing her job or her pay.

“That is privilege,” she said.

Those differences matter when healthcare leaders make decisions about the communities they serve.

“If you can’t feed your family, you’re not worried about whether you can pay for a blood pressure medication or not,” Townsend said.

That perspective helped shape a project years in the making: building a full-service hospital in a community that had gone more than 150 years without one. Norton West Louisville Hospital opened in November 2024, seven years after the idea was first proposed. Townsend serves as its chief administrative officer.

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How Townsend’s Family and Early Career Shaped Her Path to Nursing

Townsend’s instinct to care for people began long before she entered nursing.

She grew up in a family where helping others was part of everyday life. Her mother and aunt opened their home to people who needed somewhere to go, and her family served as foster parents. Townsend has also been a certified foster parent.

Taking care of people, she explained, was the foundation of her family’s values.

She initially thought she would become a physician but chose nursing because she wanted to be closer to patients.

Her career also included an experience that might seem unrelated to healthcare leadership: helping run her mother’s restaurant. That work gave her exposure to the operational side of running a business, managing people, and solving problems, skills that became valuable as she moved into healthcare administration.

In 2017, Townsend and Dr. Kirstie Matzek, then a Norton colleague and now CEO of Shawnee Christian Healthcare Center, pitched the idea of building a full-service hospital in West Louisville.

Townsend recognized that the community was underserved and underrepresented, with significant healthcare disparities and barriers to accessing resources. She also saw something she felt others were overlooking.

“I saw a beautiful community,” she said. “I saw the lack of opportunity, but for people who deserve that opportunity as well.”

Once the project moved forward, Townsend and her team faced an important question: What did the community actually want?

Rather than decide based on assumptions, the team spent about a year and a half surveying residents. They asked what residents wanted to see, what services they needed, and what barriers they faced when accessing healthcare.

The answers surprised them. The team had assumed residents would want a facility designed to blend into the neighborhood. Instead, residents asked for a facility as beautiful as any other Norton hospital, with the same quality and experience available in other parts of the city.

“If you were to pick this up and launch it down the street or in another area of town, it needs to blend in there too,” Townsend recalled the community telling them.

It was a lesson in listening rather than assuming healthcare leaders know what is best for the people they serve. “If you don’t listen, you’re gonna mess that up,” Townsend said.

The team also had to consider the historical mistrust between healthcare institutions and many underserved communities. Townsend pointed to the Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee as one example of the history behind that mistrust.

Creating an environment where patients felt comfortable and welcomed became central to the hospital’s approach. A few examples:

• Provider attire: Physicians can choose to wear white coats, but most don’t. Many wear Norton West Louisville Hospital pullovers with slacks and tennis shoes, or scrubs, so they feel more approachable.
• Building design: The hospital features natural light, green space, a central greeting area, a pharmacy, and a bistro.
• Facility dog: Rather than visiting patients only when requested, the facility dog moves through the hospital regularly with its handler.

Townsend described the result as feeling less like a traditional healthcare facility and more like a wellness retreat. The goal was a hospital that reflected what residents asked for while providing the quality and access they believed every community deserved.

Townsend’s career raises a question for the nursing profession: How do nurses get into the rooms where major healthcare decisions are made?

As someone who began her career as an LPN and moved into hospital leadership, Townsend brings a perspective that is not always represented at executive tables.

When asked what nursing taught her about healthcare leadership that she couldn’t have learned in a business classroom, she pointed to understanding the people who actually deliver care. Many business professionals approach healthcare from an operational or financial perspective without firsthand experience in the clinical environment, she explained.

“In my seat, I get to be healthcare that approaches the business side,” she said.

That ground-level view extends well beyond nurses, she said. She pointed to patient care assistants, radiology technicians, food and nutrition staff, and others as “the folks that are the heartbeat of healthcare.”

“That is my vantage point when I’m sitting at these executive tables and it doesn’t always align with what the executives think,” she said.

She believes the people doing the work need a voice in decisions that affect how care is delivered. But she also offered a challenge to nurses: If they want to influence the business of healthcare, they need to understand the business.

Nursing leadership development often focuses on tracks within nursing departments, Townsend explained, without giving nurses opportunities to learn the operational and financial sides of healthcare organizations. She believes that needs to change.

“We as nurses have to guide the business in the direction that it needs to go,” she said.

Nurses can’t do that effectively without understanding how those decisions are made.

“It’s a give and take. It’s definitely a partnership,” she explained.

For nurses who want to move beyond caring for individual patients and start influencing the systems patients depend on, Townsend’s advice starts with one step: ask.

She encouraged nurses to ask administrators if they can:

• Sit in on director operating report meetings
• Spend time with finance professionals
• Schedule one-on-one conversations with executives to learn how the organization operates

“You know, I think we don’t ask for permission enough,” she said.

Too often, nurses assume they don’t belong in those spaces or don’t have the knowledge to contribute. Townsend wants nurses to challenge that assumption: Ask questions, seek opportunities to learn, and when someone says something can’t be done, don’t automatically accept that as the end of the conversation.

“Probe a little bit,” she advised.

Nurses don’t need to be confrontational to challenge decisions, she said. They need to understand the reasoning behind them and build the knowledge to take part in those conversations. The more nurses ask, she believes, the more opportunities they will have to join the decision-making process.

Her own career shows the value of pairing clinical experience with business knowledge.

Townsend’s career also challenges assumptions about credentials and who gets to lead in healthcare. She started as an LPN and now serves as chief administrative officer of a hospital she helped build.

When asked what she would say to nurses who believe their degree, title, or current position limits their potential, she didn’t hesitate.

“Your degree is only as limited as your mind.”

Townsend acknowledged that continued education and professional advancement have value. She encouraged nurses who want to do more to pursue additional education, including advancing from LPN to RN and beyond.

But she also challenged the profession to recognize the contributions of LPNs rather than unnecessarily restricting their opportunities.

“We are shooting ourselves in the foot by restraining LPNs,” she said.

She went further, describing the practice of limiting LPNs based on their credentials as a form of bias.

“I think there’s a place for everyone,” she explained.

Her comments echo a recent shift at the national level. In June 2026, the American Nurses Association, the parent organization of the ANCC, voted to admit LPNs and LVNs to national membership for the first time.

Her message isn’t that education doesn’t matter. It’s that titles should not automatically determine someone’s ability to contribute, lead, or influence healthcare.

As Townsend’s responsibilities grew from caring for individual patients to helping lead an entire hospital, she was asked how her philosophy of caring for people had changed. Her answer centered on the people around her.

“Having the right people on your team and around you make a difference,” she said.

She credited the employees of Norton West Louisville Hospital with the organization’s success.

The challenge of leadership, she said, is that some decisions have to be made before the data fully reflects what a leader is trying to accomplish.

“The friction comes when I have to say, I need you to just trust me because the data doesn’t show what I’m trying to tell you,” she explained.

Credibility builds over time, she said: “Once I’ve done it and I’ve done it again, you kinda sort of start to trust that she might know what she’s talking about.” She also needed leaders to trust her “to lead the way in a direction that we’ve never gone before.”

“Our hospital’s doing really, really well because of that,” she said. In its first year, the hospital logged about 24,000 emergency department visits, Townsend told Louisville Public Media.

She closed that thought with two words:

“Trust nurses.”

Listen to the full conversation with Corenza Townsend on the Nurse Converse Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

🤔 Have you ever asked to sit in on a finance or operations meeting at your hospital? Tell us in the comments below.