For years, people have said the Pensacola area had too many hospitals – Baptist, Gulf Breeze, Sacred Heart, Santa Rosa Medical Center. West Florida and Naval Hospital. As our population declined, it become harder to fill all of them. West Florida is the only for-profit hospital and has been losing money. We’ve had great duplication of services: heart, cancer, stroke, etc.
Consolidation was needed. Baptist paying $245 million to acquire the West Florida assets from Hospital Corporation of America is a good move for this area. We can’t support these many hospitals.
What does the purchase mean? West Florida Hospital will become Baptist Hospital. The old BHC facility in Downtown Pensacola will be become a psychiatric and out-patient center. Jerry Maygarden will head a panel of community representatives to determine what to with all facility and what services should be offered.
This does leave Sacred Heart as the only hospital inside the city limits. Depending on what Baptist does with the trauma center and ER at Moreno Street. Sacred Heart could see a huge increase of ER cases…not many can pay for the services provided.
The entire transition will take two years and may not be completed until Summer 2010. There will be due diligence period for Baptist to review records. The government needs to approve the deal. Then there will be migration of services to N. Davis Highway Campus and the determination of what will be offered on Moreno St. An estimated 320 jobs will be eliminated, but Baptist believes many can be done through normal attrition and not filling jobs that are currently open.
The PNJ reports in the loss in tax dollars will be about $1.5 million annually -since Davis Highway will be moving from for-profit to non-profit status. However, if West Florida had closed, the county would have lost that money anyway. Some of the Moreno St. location may be taxed depending on how it is ultimately used.
Baptist will also spend $85 million in new construction at the Davis Highway location, including a new cancer center, doubling the size of the emergency room, a new parking garage, a helicopter pad and a new physicians’ office building.
The PNJ, WEAR and the Independent News will be examining this acquisition more closely over the next few weeks. There are still many questions that need to be answered, but the bottom line is that something needed to happen. Our economy could not sustain all these hospitals.
Now let’s see if the city and county can do some consolidating.
