Ret. Maj. Gen. Marcelite Harris

The first African-American woman to ascend to the rank of major general in the U.S. Air Force has settled in Atlanta to open the first of what she hopes will become an international chain of urgent health care centers.

Retired Maj. Gen. Marcelite Harris, a graduate of Atlanta’s Spelman College and a 31-year veteran in the Air Force, is the co-founder and president of National Urgent Care Centers LLC.

The company will open its first health care center for “non-traumatic emergencies” in January in a refurbished building on Piedmont Road in Buckhead, Ms. Harris told GlobalAtlanta.

The financing for the renovation and the care center will come from Sunrise Bank of Atlanta through the Patriot Express Program, which is administered in Georgia by the state’s branch of the Small Business Administration to help military veterans transition into the private sector. 

Ms. Harris said the money provided for the program has revitalized the dream of creating health care centers to alleviate crowding in emergency rooms across the country, where the average wait for non-critical care is up to six hours, she said.

“I thought the idea had died when we ran out of money,” Ms. Harris said, but she has received verbal confirmation that she will receive a loan from Sunrise Bank, which is one of 16 banks in Georgia already certified by the Small Business Administration to provide Patriot Express loans, according to Charles Green, Sunrise Bank’s president.

“There was an open call (by the SBA) for banks to participate, and we volunteered immediately,” said Mr. Green, whose experience with SBA loans goes back to 1990, almost a decade before he literally wrote the book on SBA loans in 1999.

Mr. Green added that although the Patriot Express Program is not geared specifically toward veterans with international experience, he thinks that veterans with international contacts could make use of the limited-hassle program overseas.

“The rules have been modified to make the program more accessible for veterans.  Collateral rules are softer, and there’s less paperwork involved for the lender,” he said.  “They’ve cut some interesting corners to make this program easier in consideration of the sacrifices of those who qualify.”

Although Ms. Harris chose to locate the first National Urgent Care Center in the U.S., her highly decorated career has led to extensive organizational experience on an international scale that would be useful should the company ever reach its goal of expanding globally.

Originally from Houston, Ms. Harris always knew she wanted to travel, which is one reason she joined the Air Force. 

As she went through boot camp, she learned that her service in the military would be no lazy joyride to different tourist destinations.  But she did end up doing her share of traveling. 

“Every branch of the service has its own boot camp. You can tell them what you want to be, but then they tell you what you’re going to be,” Ms. Harris said.  

The commanders’ wish for her was to become a lieutenant, so she was shipped out to a U.S. air base in Bitburg, Germany, near the Belgian and Luxembourg borders, where she spent three years achieving the rank of captain while working in maintenance on F-4 fighter jets.

She eventually climbed to the top of that sector and became the first woman to head the maintenance department at an Air Force base.

“I was the first woman to do a lot of things,” she said, adding “first female commander at the Air Force Academy” to her list of accomplishments.

After three years in Germany, Ms. Harris worked intermittently in Illinois and California before the Vietnam War broke out. During that volatile period, she spent a year as head of airplane maintenance at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand.

“A lot of my planes came back shot up pretty good, but I never lost a plane or a pilot,” she said. 

In the U.S., Ms. Harris also has worked at the Pentagon in Washington and in various cities in Florida, Kansas, Mississippi, Texas and Oklahoma, where at one point she managed a staff of 17,000 employees.

After that experience, managing one of her urgent care centers should be relatively easy.  Each center will have about nine employees—three doctors, along with nurse practitioners and clerical workers, Ms. Harris said.

Her brother-in-law is one of the three doctors that will be in the first center.  By keeping at least three doctors in every center, Ms. Harris said they will stand out from other urgent care centers that just have nurses and other medical professionals.

The center will provide flu shots, treat broken bones, perform physicals for athletes and workers and will include a blood lab, among other services.