The Legends of Tennessee Valley: How I-CARE Becomes Action at VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare System

John Robinson loses sleep over missed phone calls.

As Patient Advocate at VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, he fields hundreds of calls from veterans who are frustrated, angry, lost in a system that’s supposed to serve them. When he tells someone he’ll call them back by the end of the day and doesn’t make it, it eats at him. The next morning, the first thing he does is call them back and apologize.

Most veterans tell him: John, I know I’m not the only one you’re dealing with.

“And that makes me feel good, but I still feel bad,” Robinson says. “Because if I give you my word, it’s all I have. It’s my word.”

When veterans don’t know where to turn, they call John Robinson by name. That trust wasn’t given. It was built. One kept promise at a time.

That’s integrity in action.

Over two months in late 2025, I conducted more than a dozen interviews with health care professionals at VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare System. Every employee at Tennessee Valley wears a button with five letters: I-CARE. Integrity. Commitment. Advocacy. Respect. Excellence.

These aren’t abstract values printed on a wall. They’re operational. They show up in how people do their jobs, how they treat veterans, how they solve problems no one asked them to solve.

Let me show you what I-CARE looks like when it becomes action.

Integrity

Dr. Elizabeth Burke’s grandfather told her never to work at the VA. Never trust it. He went once and never went back.

Most people would have listened to that warning. Burke made it her life’s work to prove him wrong. She became Chief of Quality Management and Patient Safety, leading over 100 process improvement projects in a single fiscal year, all because she wanted to build a VA her grandfather would have been proud to visit.

She took a warning about broken trust and built something trustworthy. She acts with high moral principle not because it’s easy, but because it’s right. When you lead quality management with that kind of personal stake in the outcome, every process improvement becomes personal. Every safety protocol becomes a promise kept.

Commitment

Rory Thompson survived four suicide attempts before he became Chief of Veteran Experience at Tennessee Valley.

Four times, he nearly left this world. Now he spends his days making sure other veterans don’t follow that same path. Most people bury their trauma. Thompson weaponized his against the very thing that almost killed him. He turned his darkest moments into his greatest mission.

That’s commitment. Not to a job. To a calling that won’t let you go.

Dr. John Nadeau spent forty years in service, from Marine Corps surgeon to Chief of Staff. At 79 years old, he still comes to work every day. Not because he has to. Because he chooses to. When I asked him about Veterans Day, he didn’t give me a polished answer. He gave me truth. He talked about the calling that still calls, even after decades, even after he could have walked away.

Forty years, and he’s still answering.

Dr. Michael Gulley runs the Residential Rehabilitation Treatment Program. He told me about veterans building walls around their trauma and addiction, walls so high and thick that most people would walk away. He doesn’t walk away. He shows up. Again and again.

He told me that relapse is not failure. It’s part of recovery. He told me that veterans deserve care as many times as it takes.

As many times as it takes.

In a world that gives people one chance, maybe two, he offers infinite grace. That’s commitment to the veteran’s recovery, not to a timeline or a metric. That’s working diligently to serve veterans driven by an earnest belief in the mission.

Advocacy

Hannah McDuffie showed me what it means to truly be veteran-centric. She told me about Point in Time Count, where she and her team went out at ten o’clock at night in January. Thirty degrees. Knocking on car windows. Walking through wooded trails.

Some people were veterans. Some were not. All of them were seen.

That’s not in her job description. That’s her going into the cold, into the dark, into the places where people have been forgotten. That’s identifying and fully considering the interests of veterans even when they’re sleeping in their cars. Most people would never go there. She goes.

Stacey Parsons works with justice-involved veterans, the ones in handcuffs, the ones in courtrooms, the ones society has written off. She shows up every Tuesday at Veterans Treatment Court. Every single Tuesday. She makes promises and keeps them, in a world where these veterans have been let down by every system they’ve ever encountered.

She told me about sitting outside a movie theater at sixteen years old, talking to a young woman from a group home for two hours while her friends hung out without her. Even then, she was drawn to people who were struggling. That gravitational pull toward pain never left her. It just found its purpose in appropriately advancing the interests of veterans no one else wants to see.

Dr. Brett Cohen and Dr. Andrew Neck built the Tele-EC program from scratch. They created a system that allows veterans in rural Tennessee to see a board-certified emergency physician within minutes of calling, from their homes, from wherever they are when crisis strikes.

Eighty-five percent of the veterans they see never have to go to an emergency room. They stay home. They get the care they need.

Dr. Cohen told me about veterans who refuse to go to the ER, even when their symptoms are serious. They’ve had bad experiences. They can’t find a ride. They can’t afford to miss work. Before Tele-EC, nurses would hear concerning stories and have no way to help. Now they hand that veteran off to a physician who will see them immediately, who will listen, who will convince them to seek care if they need it or treat them right there if they don’t.

They didn’t wait for someone to fix the problem. They identified what veterans needed and built the solution themselves. That’s advocacy through innovation.

Respect

Lynn Daugherty transformed women’s health care at Tennessee Valley. She read a book that changed everything for her: instead of asking “what’s wrong with you,” she learned to ask “what happened to you.”

That shift in perspective became the foundation of her entire program. Not judgment. Understanding. Not diagnosis. Story.

Under her leadership, the Women’s Health Program at Tennessee Valley achieved a 90% trust score among women veterans, when the private sector averages 38% to 65%.

Ninety percent.

She built that trust one question at a time. She treats all those she serves with dignity and respect, and she shows respect to earn it. She told me about baby showers where women veterans sit down eating alone, and within minutes they’re giggling, sharing phone numbers, building community. She doesn’t just provide health care. She creates belonging.

Dr. La-Kenya Rushing asked me a question I can’t stop thinking about: What matters most?

She has spent thirty years in nursing and health care leadership, and that question is her compass. Not what is efficient. Not what is cost-effective. Not what looks good on paper. What matters most. When you lead with that question, everything changes. Every decision filters through it. Every policy bends to it. Every patient feels it.

That’s respect for the veteran’s priorities, not the institution’s convenience.

Traci Boswell integrates mental health into primary care because she understands that veterans shouldn’t have to navigate separate systems to get help. She embeds it into their routine care. She meets them in the spaces they already trust. The veteran comes in for a checkup and leaves with their whole self addressed. Body and mind.

She respects the veteran’s time, their dignity, and their wholeness as a person. She doesn’t make them announce their mental health needs in a different building, to a different team, on a different day. She treats them with the respect they deserve by making care seamless.

Excellence

Dr. Kristina Gill, Dr. Christina Creech, Dr. Rebecca Cripps, and Dr. Traci Dutton run pharmacy residency programs that have graduated over 150 residents since 1991. They train the next generation of clinical pharmacists who will care for veterans long after they’re gone. Their advice is simple: Be a sponge. Absorb everything. Learn constantly.

These four women lead a program that was recognized as Residency of the Year by the Tennessee Pharmacist Association in 2020. When Dr. Creech tells people she’s a pharmacist, they ask which pharmacy she works at. She says she works directly with patients, writes prescriptions, has a DEA license. They’re amazed.

They’re not just training pharmacists. They’re building a legacy of excellence that will outlive them all. They’re planting trees whose shade they’ll never sit in. They strive for the highest quality and continuous improvement, and they’re accountable for results that won’t show up for decades.

Dr. Kanah Lewallen and Amanda Docktor train nurses through residency programs, ensuring the next generation understands what it means to serve veterans. Dr. Lewallen told me you can’t teach someone to have the passion. Either they have it or they don’t. But what you can do is nurture it, shape it, and give it a place to grow. They see potential and cultivate it into expertise. They’re thoughtful and decisive in leadership, willing to be rigorous in developing the next generation.

Kelly Drumright and Dr. Matthew Mart are reimplementing the ICU Liberation Bundle, fighting against decades of medical dogma to ensure veterans leave the ICU not just alive, but cognitively intact and physically strong. They want veterans to return to the lives they had before crisis struck. Not survival. Restoration.

They’re challenging the way things have always been done because the way things have always been done isn’t good enough. That’s striving for the highest quality. That’s being willing to admit when current practices need improvement and being rigorous in correcting them.

LaKeisha Brooks makes VA care as easy as Amazon, breaking down every barrier between veterans and the health care they’ve earned. She sees a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who thinks he can’t do virtual care, and she shows him his phone. She says, I see you have solitaire on there. If you can play solitaire, you can do this.

She doesn’t accept the barrier. She dismantles it. That’s excellence in problem-solving. That’s continuous improvement in action.

Dr. Bridget Brozyna leads from the heart, doing work that fills her cup so completely that she overflows into others. She serves as Associate Chief of Staff for Education and leads with purpose that radiates through every conversation. When she speaks about her work, you hear someone who has found alignment between who she is and what she does.

Dr. Ledetra Bridges supports the caregivers, the invisible army behind every veteran. She watched her mother care for her grandmother as a teenager, and that image never left her. Now she dedicates her life to making sure no caregiver feels alone. She told me about caregivers who never leave the house, who never get to go to church or socialize, until the respite program gives them a few hours of freedom. She told me about veterans who were in nursing homes, wanting desperately to go home, and through the caregiver program, their families were able to bring them back. She gave them their dignity. She gave them their homes. She gave them their final chapters on their own terms.

The Architect

At the helm of it all is Daniel Dücker, Executive Director of Tennessee Valley Healthcare System.

Every person I interviewed, every story I heard, exists because of the culture he built. When Dr. Burke chose to prove her grandfather wrong, she did it here. When Rory Thompson turned his suicide attempts into mission, he did it here. When Hannah McDuffie knocked on car windows in freezing temperatures, when Stacey Parsons showed up every Tuesday, when Dr. Cohen built an application from scratch to bridge distance, they did it here.

Under his leadership. In the space he created.

Dücker doesn’t just lead Tennessee Valley Healthcare System. He cultivates it. He has built a place where I-CARE is not an acronym on a button but a lived reality. Where integrity means keeping promises even when it’s hard. Where commitment means showing up for as long as it takes. Where advocacy means going into the cold to find veterans where they are. Where respect means asking what happened instead of what’s wrong. Where excellence means never settling for good enough.

His article is titled “Leading with Selflessness,” and every story in this collection is proof of that title. These health care professionals aren’t just doing their jobs. They’re living I-CARE values in ways that transform what health care can be.

They are the legends of Tennessee Valley.