Cherie Holmes, MD, MSc, has worked at Cheshire Medical Center for nearly three decades.
During her tenure at Cheshire, she’s held several roles, including orthopaedic surgeon, chief medical officer and currently, designated institutional official for Graduate Medical Education.
As she approaches her retirement later this month, she said it’s the people she’ll miss most, saying they made her a better caregiver and person.
“I will miss my patients, I will miss my colleagues, I will miss my staff ..., “ Holmes said. “Some of those people I will still see and stay in contact with, [but] the patients … you don’t see, and they’re really a pleasure to take care of.”
Holmes started at Cheshire in 1997 as a staff orthopaedist and served ten years as chair of the surgery and orthopaedics departments.
She discovered her interest in orthopaedics at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC. In addition to her love of sports drawing her to sports medicine, she also appreciated the instant gratification orthopaedists received from resetting bones and replacing joints.
“With ortho, you can take a broken bone, you fix it, it heals … ,” she said. “You see the results right away. You get people back to sports, kids back to playing, older people walking again.”
Following medical school, Holmes completed her internship at the original Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover and finished her orthopaedic residency at the Harvard Combined Orthopeadic Residency Program. She then completed a fellowship in orthopaedic traumatology at Maryland Institute of Emergency Medical Systems and a sports medicine fellowship at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
Before joining Cheshire’s staff, Holmes served nearly four years as a clinical assistant professor of orthopaedics at the National Navy Medical Center, including seven months deployed to the Persian Gulf during the first Gulf War.
Afterward, she started working for a private practice, but was disappointed with the uncoordinated patient care between private practitioners. She started looking for other jobs across the country, eventually choosing to practice with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic—a multi-specialty group now known as Cheshire Medical Center—which reminded her of the Navy.
“It was the fact that I could go up a floor and I could chat with primary care, a subspecialist or a different surgeon about some issues with a patient …,” Holmes said. “You could just talk to people and get the information that you needed.”
As her time at Cheshire went on, Holmes said she also appreciated the familial and multi-generational care she could provide here.
“I’ve been here long enough that I have seen the children of my original pediatric patients come through,” she said. “It’s a true joy.”
As much as her time as an orthopaedic provider and surgeon was gratifying, Holmes said she is equally as proud of her work in leadership and administration.
One of those accomplishments is her role in the hiring process, where she focused on adding emergency medicine trained physicians to the medical staff and transforming that staff into a group with experiential, national and international breadth and depth.
“I hoped that, by the time I finished, I would see a medical staff that was a bit more reflective of the demographics of our Monadnock community, a community that has slowly transformed over time, than when I first came,” Holmes said. “Although there is always more work, I feel very pleased with many of the hires that have come.”
Now, as she approaches her final days at Cheshire, Holmes said she doesn’t really plan to slow down.
She aims to spend her retirement on “engaging in new endeavors in healthcare or, hopefully, outside of healthcare,” volunteering, gardening and spending time enjoying a classic Monadnock Region summer.
“I will stay busy,” Holmes assured. “I’m not kicking back doing nothing.”