BY JAMES WILLIAMS
Special to the Telegraph
STARKE—Officials from North Florida Regional Hospital visited the Starke Rotary Club to update the civic leaders on the status of the hospital’s stand-alone emergency department in Starke and its plans for expansion in Bradford County.
No mall, just farmland
Tom Haeseker, the facility’s director of business growth, said the hospital’s corporate owner, Hospital Corporation of America, was founded in Nashville in 1968 by Drs Thomas Frist, Sr. and Jr. with businessman Jack Massey. Since then, HCA has become one of the nation’s largest healthcare providers.
Among the hospitals on its roster is North Florida Regional Medical Center in Gainesville, which turns 50 this year.
Haeseker said North Florida Regional was built “…because physicians in the early 1970s felt Alachua General and UF Health couldn’t do the right things for the patient population they were taking care of.”
Area physicians started petitioning companies to consider building another hospital in Gainesville.
At the time, HCA owned four hospitals in Tennessee. “In Gainesville, what is now the NFRMC was farmland,” Haeseker said, “and there was no mall across the road.” Completed in 1973, North Florida Regional was the first hospital HCA built from the ground up.
Emergency visits triple
One of its satellites, HCA Florida’s Starke ER is an emergency center established in 2020. Haeseker said patient visits to the Starke facility have tripled since HCA’s Colley Road facility opened, with 25 visits daily.
“We’re now up to 25,000 visits this year. We’re seeing 80 patients a day some days.” Haeseker added that patient satisfaction rates ran as high as 85 percent.
New technology, nursing school
Jack Stout, North Florida Regional’s vice president for emergency services, manages stand-alone departments like the Starke ER.
Among other topics the two representatives discussed are HCA’s efforts to attract specialty physicians to Starke, a recently purchased nursing school, and investments in new technology available to Starke ER patients. Last year, North Florida Regional spent $4.7 million on hospital equipment or surgical space, with an additional $2.2 million invested in surgical services.
“We just brought on software for our cardiac MRI that supports our structural heart program,” said Stout. “We have a third cardiothoracic surgeon who has been a big help to…. structural heart valve replacement…We now have five robotic consoles. Physicians… do the surgery using robotic arms across the room.”
Stout praised professional personnel at the Starke facility and said that though North Florida Regional was already a large hospital, “…the construction will not stop. We’re building another 100-bed hospital (on Archer Road in Gainesville) because…(with) this community and markets all around, there’s just not enough hospital beds…we’re building a hospital within two years to be essentially the same as North Florida with those same services but on a much smaller scale.”
Within the last year, HCA has also bought a shareholder stake in the Galen School of Nursing, with multiple branches nationwide, including St. Petersburg. Galen will open a new branch in Gainesville, which gives HCA—and Starke ER—an advantage in maintaining a constant, up-to-date supply of nurses.
“We are looking at offering spots in classes in those areas we serve. It would be much easier for the students in Bradford County to apply to that school,” Stout added.
HCA already provides scholarships, financial assistance, and job opportunities while students are in school. The organization has also partnered with Santa Fe College for its paramedic and surgical tech programs.
More services in Bradford County
Stout asked the Rotarians, “What more do you think would be of value that would help the Starke community?’
More outpatient services, the Rotarians responded, like radiology, and more and varied specialists so patients can avoid going to different places for different treatments.
Haeseker fielded the latter question, suggesting that putting new doctors on staff is easier said than done. The first issue is convincing a highly trained, qualified medical professional to move to this area’s relatively smaller market.
“A lot of it has to do with staffing,” Haesecker added. “It’s not just bringing the doctor and putting them in a storefront. The doctor has three staff, two medical assistants, and all the authorizations accompanying it; then getting the additional site hooked up with insurance.”
NFRMC has a thousand patients a year from Bradford County who come for colonoscopy screening. “But we just don’t have the staff (to do that at Starke ER.)”
Praise for Starke facility
Stout said the Starke ER is on par with the quality of care offered at the emergency department within North Florida’s main hospital on Newberry Road in Gainesville.
“My freestanding ERs are exactly like the main emergency department at the main hospital,” Stout said. “We can do anything and everything they can do there, including stroke care. And (the website) displays a timer beside each facility that will tell you the average wait time at either facility.”
Stout suggested the public go to nfrmc.com to see what Starke ER offers and the full array of medical services available at North Florida Regional in Gainesville.
In closing, one Rotarian praised his and his wife’s experience with Starke ER personnel and the two medical facilities.
“One of the best things about the staff here is they all have longevity,” Stout responded. “They have ties to the community. The average length of employment here at (Starke ER) is 15 to 20 years. That’s unheard of anymore. And what makes this such a good place to be is that you have people that care about (both) the community and taking care of patients.”
