Here's why Palm Coast's planned new AdventHealth hospital won't have a birth center or trauma center

Palm Coast Observer
News

With AdventHealth's expansion to a new location on Palm Coast Parkway, the city is getting a second hospital. But it won't be getting a birth center or a trauma center — two things community members have complained about lacking, and that the hospital's chief operating officer addressed during a Feb. 2 presentation before the Palm Coast City Council.

City OK's West Pines zoning amendment

The Palm Coast City Council has approved on second reading an amendment to the zoning for eight residential lots.

The change will allow the lots' owners, who bought under the assumption that they'd be able to build normal single-family homes, to do so — even though the West Pines Planned Unit Development agreement had originally required that any homes built on those lots be attached such that neighboring owners would have had to agree on the same architectural style, colors and construction timing.

The city's initial proposal to update the zoning had invited some pushback from area residents who thought the proposed setbacks for the potential homes was too narrow, but the city's staff reworked the technicalities and came to a compromise that increased the setbacks from 7.5 feet to 12.5 feet.

The council had approved the proposal 5-0 on first reading at its Jan. 19 meeting.

In both cases, the issue comes down to numbers and demand, AdventHealth Palm Coast chief operating officer Wally De Aquino explained.

"We get a lot of questions about [a birth center], and why, even though we're putting this beautiful facility in our community, it will not have birth center," he said.

"We are excited that we will be starting this project soon and will be able to offer better access and high quality healthcare to the community."

— WALLY DE AQUINO, AdventHealth chief operating officer

Although the hospital hasn't yet compiled last year's data, when it looked at the previous year's, the number of births in Flagler County was 824, he said. If the new hospital added a birth center, it wouldn't be getting all of those cases.

"It became clear to us that if we had a birth center, we would only have less than two births per day in Flagler County in our hospital," De Aquino said. "The biggest problem for us as a healthcare system is recruiting physicians that would be willing to come to a community where they know that the volume is so low. It would be incredibly difficult for us to recruit trained nurses to come and work in a unit where they would not be able to keep up with the requirements, the number of births, for their proficiencies. So that is even bigger issue for us than just looking at financials."

Trauma centers, meanwhile, must be approved by the state. A couple of years ago, De Aquino said, AdventHealth hired a consulting company to see how close the hospital was to meeting the requirements needed to apply to open a trauma center.

"We weren't even close," he said. "There's a lot of requirements; there's a lot of demand that needs to take place for us to be able to be able to even apply and try to get approval."

Councilman Victor Barbosa asked how many births the community would need to have, per year, for a birth center to become feasible.

De Aquino said the hospital itself would need to be handling 1,200 births per year. It would likely get 60-75% of the market share — with 60% being more realistic, De Aquino said — so the community as a whole would need to have 1,600-2,000 births annually, or twice the current number, to reach that threshold.