Northern Arizona Healthcare is rolling out its new 5 year strategic plan, just two years after Flagstaff votes shot down a controversial proposal to construct a new hospital just south of Flagstaff
Last week, NAH CEO Dave Cheney said this time they are developing the plan with an ear to the local community.
“We've spent almost a year doing nothing but listening, listening to the community, listening to our medical staff, listening to our 4,000 employees.” Chaney said. “We took all that information, we went back to the board, and we said, ‘This is what's important.’”
Cheney and other NAH administrators met with Coconino County and City of Flagstaff officials and local leaders last week.
NAH says it still needs a larger and more modern medical facility than the Flagstaff Medical Center currently provides.
Administrators are evaluating five sites, including an expansion of their current building.
But they say building in place remains a challenging option.
Two years ago, opponents of the new hospital project pointed to hospitals in other larger cities that have expanded their facilities in place.
Cheney says he has experience expanding facilities in other places but limited access to medical care in northern Arizona creates complications with moving in that direction in this instance.
“One of the big differences is we could shut down our hospitals in Phoenix or northern California and patients could quickly maneuver over two miles, three miles, at most five miles, go to a different hospital,” Cheney said. “It's not that we can't build a new hospital on this site, it's that it's not feasible. I'm not willing – unless the community tells me to – to shut this hospital down for two and a half years while we knock everything down, close services.”
NAH officials say they plan to hold public meetings on the future of the hospital hill property in the coming months, while the NAH board will discuss a new facility by the end of the year.
Regardless of the proposed location, the proposal will not include the concept for a ‘medical village’ – which was central to their 2023 plan and brought residential and commercial development alongside a new hospital.
Cheney said it was clear that the ‘village’ concept was a significant sticking point within the community.
“We heard loud and clear: ‘We do not like the idea of the village concept. That does not resonate with us. We don't like our hospital system getting involved in real estate development,’” Cheney said. “We've eliminated the village concept out of wherever we put this new hospital. The village concept is no longer there.”
But Cheney cautioned that any new facility must respond to the needs of the entire region and can not be focused on surviving Flagstaff alone.
And he said those who think of the Flagstaff Medical Center as purely a community hospital are mistaken.
“At one point in Northern Arizona Healthcare's history, Flagstaff Medical Center was a community hospital,” Cheney said. “Somewhere in the past 10 years or so, we have transitioned into this regional referral center. And it's important because when I go to the outlying communities and I talk to the mayors [...] they totally get it. And the mayors are saying, ‘That's our hospital too.’”
“[When] someone gets into a car wreck in Cottonwood or Sedona and they go to the emergency room, and they realize ‘Hey, this person has internal bleeding. They need to get into surgery right now. They have to be in a level one trauma center.’ They're going to refer that patient, probably by a helicopter, into Flagstaff.”
