In a little more than two weeks, Baptist Hospital will move from its aging campus on E and Moreno streets to a $650 million facility on a high-profile site near Interstate 110.
This week, Inweekly learned that Baptist will leave no doctors, nurses or clinicians at the old inner-city campus to treat the Black families and others within walking distance that have depended on the hospital for more than 70 years.
“We, Baptist, are not going to have medical clinical services here following the move,” said Jennifer Grove, Baptist Health Care’s vice president of external relations. “We have team members staying, but they’re not clinical.”
She said that Baptist had studied how people within walking distance of the hospital have accessed its services. Grove said, “The vast majority—in the upper 80 percentages—is through the ED (Emergency Department) for primary care needs and dental care.”
Baptist asked Community Health Northwest Florida to step up a clinic on the old campus and meet those needs.
“We had worked with Chandra (Smiley) at Community Health Northwest Florida,” Grove said. “We identified a parcel that our board had agreed to donate to them for her to build a facility that would offer primary care and dental, but her board decided to go in a different direction, so that won’t be right here on our campus.”
Does Baptist have a Plan B to serve that community at the old campus? Apparently not.
“(People within walking distance) are using the ED but not for ED care,” Grove said. “Chandra and her team are figuring out how to meet those needs. A lot of the patients that are in that category are patients who are actually patients of Community Health Northwest Florida.*** For others who actually need our ED, they’ll just be transported to the new ED where we can provide that level of emergent care needed.”
The Baptist vice president pointed out that Community Health has added more services to neighborhoods and has a health navigator in its ED, and Baptist has negotiated a direct bus route from the E Street area to its new campus.
We will have more on this in our Sept. 14 issue.
***Note: I deleted from the original post …”need greater access to the services that they offer.” Grove clarified that she intended to say that Community Health has increased its services to the area. I also added that Baptist has gotten a direct bus route from the area to its new campus.