You may have heard rumors of a new hospital going up where the old Jennersville Hospital was, and you would be correct in those.
Christiana Care bought the hospital after Tower Health left and after much consideration they have decided to build it into what they are calling a Neighborhood Hospital. So, what is a neighborhood Hospital you may be asking yourself?
Well, I haven't actually found anything defining a neighborhood Hospital, but I did find a good and quick read by Katie Fricke AIA, NCARB, ACH Health Planning Principal* who tells us that "The American Hospital Association defines Community Hospitals as all nonfederal, short-term general, and other special hospitals. ... (but) This definition leads to a very broad capture of hospitals." She then gets specific with her own definition of community hospitals as a smaller hospital typically in a small town which derives its character form the neighborhoods fabric and sense of community. They are typically larger than the 5-15 bed micro hospitals, starting with 35-50 and premade plans to grow in beds, ambulance services, support services, medical offices space and infrastructure being a theme for all of them. Now from what I could gather from the representatives sent to describe the plans this Neighborhood hospital will be something in between the micro and the community hospital.
Christiana Care had representatives come to the Oxford Regional Planning Committee meetings and one of the Oxford Area Chamber of Commerce meetings to help introduce their ideas and answer questions from the community so I'm going to take a little time to share with you all what I've learned.
Firstly, we can expect them to be open June 2025. They are going to be renovating and be under construction through the winter with construction slated to be over by May of 2025. They will start off as a 10 bed emergency room which be located at what is the current rear entrance.
The next phase will not be to increase the hospital emergency room capacity but will instead be to add medical office space for specialties like cardiovascular health, obstetrics, and more as well as primary care, and pediatric care as well. The current medical offices will not be affected in the rebuild, nor will they be replaced once the second phase begins. All Christiana Care specialties will be housed in newly build medical office spaces.
The hospital will actually stay as just an emergency room. There will be no ICU and it will not be a trauma hospital. Because of this they are planning on keeping the helipad for quick transport to Chester County or Christiana Hospital in Newark.
The Christiana Care network does not have personal experience with these smaller neighborhood hospitals which is why they will actually be contracting out the staff to another company which they say has a lot of experience with running smaller neighborhood hospitals and should be able to make this hospital run efficiently.
There are no current plans to bring medic 94 back into the hospital. They will continue to stay in their new facility right up the road thanks to Penn Townships' gracious generosity in building the facility and the low rent being charged.
There have been questions as to why there needs to be construction done. While the Jennersville Hospital was operational the older building codes were grandfathered in which aloud it to continue running. With a new owner however, the building needs to be updated to be brought up to code for everyone's safety, because of the changes made it is more efficient to knock it down and build back up rather than try to piecemeal update everything. They also want to make sure that the space is being utilized in the way that they need it to be for their vision which means taking things down and rebuilding too.
There were questions about why Christiana Care staff would not be running the operation. While Christiana Care system Dr.s will be employed in the specialty offices the Christiana health care system doesn't have experience running or managing these smaller micro hospital style emergency rooms so they have contracted a company who has run these neighborhood hospitals successfully throughout this and other states for some time now. The new medical offices will employ Christiana Care specialists.
There were questions as to the size of this neighborhood hospitals being large enough to handle the amount of residents we have now and are anticipated to grow to with all the new developments being built. Christiana Care does believe that these plans will fit the current needs of our community. They said they do plan on reviewing and re-evaluate their plans every few years to make sure that they are best benefiting our community. If they find that they need more beds or a larger staff, they will have the ability and space to expand the hospital, but as of now the plan is to keep the hospital at 10 beds.
There were questions about future plans to add an ICU or Trauma unit being added so that we would not need to medivac people with the helicopter pad or ambulance to the next closest hospital 40 minutes away. Christiana Care does not have any plans to add a trauma unit or ICU. Given the research they did they did not feel that it would be necessary to have these services at this location, but if they feel the need for it arises in the future they will be reviewing and re-evaluating their plans every few years and making what changes they feel necessary to best benefit our community.
What are your thoughts?
Article where I learned about community Hospitals*: https://www.hdrinc.com/sites/default/files/2020-09/community-hospital-trends-lessons-hdr_0.pdf
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