Susan Carroll: A Guardian of the Community's Health

“There’s something humbling about being asked to speak at your alma mater,” Susan Carroll ’96 told the crowds during Radford’s winter commencement ceremonies in December. “I can tell you when I sat in your shoes, I didn’t think I’d ever be invited back like this.”

But, of course, a lot has happened since Carroll’s graduation – she is, today, the president of Inova Loudon Hospital in Leesburg, Virginia, while also serving as senior vice president of Inova Health System. Those positions represent the culmination of more than a quarter century of her patient service and her administrating, a pursuit that started professionally just two years after she left Radford.

In a recent interview, Carroll recalled that, like many young students, she explored a wide range of possibilities before she chose the path she ultimately followed.

“To be honest, for much of those first four years, I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” she said. “Maybe I wanted to be a lawyer? Maybe a teacher? Maybe a hundred different things.”

One key undertaking during her senior year, however, sharpened her focus on the future.

“I knew I wanted to go into some form of business, and then I did an internship at Radford Community Hospital,” Carroll said. “It was actually in the marketing department, but the hospital was fairly small, so I got to really see the business side of running a hospital, and that’s what piqued my interest.”

Hospitals are like cities, she explained. Complex systems that require numerous types of professionals in order to function. Doctors and nurses, yes, but also accountants, public relations departments, data analytics, dieticians, food service workers, even engineers.

“Nearly every single job that can be done, you can do in a hospital,” she said. “It’s an industry, like any other, but I also love the idea that you could work in a business field while at the same time also doing nonprofit work, also being driven by a greater purpose.

“I think when you work in an industry that is as purpose-driven as healthcare, it really impacts your entire life. And it really has made me into somebody who realizes the importance of giving back and growing in your own community,” she said.

Carroll pays forward that sense of responsibility in other ways as well. She and her husband, Matt, have two sons – Turner, a college sophomore, and Cooper, a high school junior – who both perform volunteer work and, occasionally, they take it somewhat further than simply pitching in.

“My oldest son, Turner, signed up to be in the bone marrow registry,” Carroll said. “He called me and said, ‘Should I do this?’ and I said, ‘Absolutely.’

“Now, six months later, he’s going to be an anonymous bone marrow donor for an older man he doesn’t know, who doesn’t have any family that matches him, and Turner’s a match,” she added.

It’s a daunting task for Turner, who’s not yet 20, but it’s also representative of Carroll’s philosophy.

“We try to instill this belief that the more we give back to other people, the better our own lives will be,” she said.