Carilion CEO appoints chief of staff

Carilion Clinic has named Chris Turnbull chief of staff for Steve Arner, the Roanoke-based health care system’s president and CEO, according to a Monday announcement.

Joining Carilion as a senior advisor in public relations and corporate communications in 2014, Turnbull went on to become senior director of corporate communications in 2020, according to his LinkedIn page.

Carilion credits Turnbull with building the health system’s corporate communications team and serving as part of a leadership team that navigated the pandemic, adding that he’s “often involved in addressing complex challenges across the health system.”

Turnbull launched his career as a public relations account manager at John Lambert Associates, a Roanoke firm. He went on to provide strategic risk management and crisis management advice to executives as an analyst at the Tabb Group, a New York financial markets research and strategic advisory firm, and as a senior business continuity officer for the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

Turnbull has a degree in English from Roanoke College and a master’s degree in management, with a focus on leadership communication from the University of Maryland Global Campus. 

He sits on the board of Cardinal News, a nonprofit news site covering Southwest and Southern Virginia.

A nonprofit health care organization serving nearly 1 million people in Virginia through hospitals, outpatient specialty centers and primary care practices, Carilion Clinic has more than 13,000 employees. In October, the health system broke ground on the Carilion Taubman Cancer Center, a six-story building on the Virginia Tech Carilion Health Sciences and Technology Campus.