Medical providers expanding to keep up with St. Johns County's booming population growth

With a growing population comes growing needs for health care services.

The latest acquisition of Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine by UF Health indicates a growing focus on Northeast Florida's consistent population growth and the health care needs that come with it.

UF Health St. Johns President and CEO Carlton DeVooght said the integration with Flagler Health has created a good presence, especially in southern St. Johns County.

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UF Health and Baptist Health have both set their sights on health care needs in Northeast Florida, and both have expansion plans throughout the area in the works.

“In St. Johns County — particularly Northwest St. Johns County — that’s where a lot of growth is. It is part of our mission and what a community-based health care organization does is putting that primary medicine as close to where people are living as possible,” said Catherine Graham, a senior vice president at Baptist Health.

Baptist has over 200 sites, Graham said, including five community-based hospitals, the region’s only children’s hospital — Wolfson in San Marco — and 11 primary care offices in St. Johns County.

“You want to be very thoughtful and very strategic and think about community needs when you think about where to put the acute care hospitals,” Graham said.

Expanding community-based care

While growth in St. Johns County is concentrated in the north, DeVooght said “there is still significant growth in St. Augustine area as well.”

“There’s a clear-cut need for health care in the northern part of the county,” he said. “When we put a primary care physician into part of the community, typically it takes six to nine months for the practice to be full. Recently, the practices in northern St. Johns have been full in less than two months.”

Plans for the St. Augustine campus include renovations to the operating rooms and surgery center. Also in St. Johns County, at the Durbin campus, hospital construction is set to begin by the end of December. Construction is expected to be 24 months from the beginning to seeing first patients.

Expansion plans take into account overall demographics, population growth and data related to discharges from ZIP codes throughout the region, DeVooght said. This allows the health care system to view the historic needs of the community and plan for the future.

“St. Johns County and particularly northern St. Johns County are healthy folks,” Graham said. “They have a need and a preference for primary care and preventative care.”

All development plans are in line with a focus on “aging well,” she said.

Michael Mayo, the president and CEO of Baptist Health, said it’s all about the “bookends of life” — from maternity and children’s care to seniors and geriatric medicine.

Mayo said a community like St. Johns County has a “mixed population of young, healthy folks” as well as children and seniors, showing a greater need for physician offices.

“It’s not so much ‘where is the population growing?’ but ‘where do we need to be located?’” he said. “We don’t want to duplicate services. We’re being smart about the services we’re providing.”

Graham said this is why they are building the freestanding emergency department for immediate care while focusing on seniors in Nocatee and the two Del Webb communities with 23 acres at Silverleaf.

Although it will probably be about two years before stuff starts moving there, she said, women’s and children’s health care are coming into place there.

“We continue to look at primary care and expand primary care,” she said. “We are always allowing for growth.”

Battling workforce woes

Patrick Green, UF Health Jacksonville’s CEO and president, noted growth is not only at local medical facilities but also in the job sector.

“We’re focused on increased demand for our services,” he said. “We’re focused on being an economic generator for the region. The population in Jacksonville continues to grow, [and] the people who are moving and growing here need comprehensive medical services … It really comes down to population and community needs.”

Graham said Baptist Health isn’t “in a rush to open facilities” partly because it is intent on understanding the area and also because providing workforce and ancillary staff is “one of the true limiting factors.”

“Our pace is not around the build,” she said. “Our pace is ‘Are we where we need to be with the type of service that the data shows us and the community is asking for?’ The prevailing force is the availability of workforce. We have to continue to really focus on why people would want to work with Baptist Health in these settings.”

Florida’s population is projected to grow to 25.34 million in 2033, according to a Florida Hospital Association report, with the average projected growth from April 2024 to April 2028 at about 817 people per day.

Florida’s vacancy rate in health care, however, is 3 percentage points lower than the national rate, according to the report. And the turnover rate for the state has nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels, indicating a healthy workforce for the industry.

Mayo, who serves on the national and state Hospital Association Boards of Trustees, said recruiting and retaining medical staff is “top of mind at the national and local and state levels.”

“What we’re trying to do is create an environment and culture that people want to work in,” he said. “I think that draws people to our organization.”

Although hospital patient admissions increased only 3% from 2019 to 2022, the FHA report said, overall workforce costs have increased disproportionately by 45% due to factors including overtime, incentives, premium pay and salary market share adjustments.

In a competitive job market, this is a trend that is likely to continue, especially with so many facilities and job openings popping up in Northeast Florida.

“Being in health care requires that we put our patients first,” Green said, “but we also have to put the people who serve the patients first.”

As the area continues to grow, so will the need for high quality health care workers, he said.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Health care providers set sights on St. Johns growth with new facilities