One year ago, AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway officially opened its doors to patients.
With Flagler County’s population continuing to grow, AdventHealth invested $167 million to build the new hospital and grow alongside the community.
A 100-bed facility, AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway is AdventHealth’s second hospital in Flagler County. The other facility is AdventHealth Palm Coast, and it recently celebrated two decades of caring for the Flagler County community.
“Over the past year, we cared for close to 29,000 individual people at our new hospital – this includes residents and visitors alike,” said Wally De Aquino, president and CEO for AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway and an area resident since 2005. “But that number doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of these individuals had multiple visits with us and our volumes of visits were greater than we imagined when we first started planning construction. Clearly, there was a great need for more ways for our community to access care – whether visiting the emergency department, being admitted for an inpatient stay, or scheduling a surgery or an appointment with their physician. It is a privilege to care for our community and it is a responsibility our entire team honors every day.”
AdventHealth noted a 36% increase year-over-year in emergency department visits in Flagler County, along with a 35% increase in admissions and 19% increase in surgeries.
Additionally, the new hospital cared for 5,300 inpatient visits, 16,700 outpatient visits, 30,000 emergency room visits, and completed 1,400 surgeries in the last year.
AdventHealth also invested heavily in expanding the local robotic surgery technology.
All of this growth required hiring more team members than anticipated.
“We initially planned on employing between 300 to 500 new team members at our new hospital, but because there was such a great need in our community, we exceeded expectations,” De Aquino said, noting that AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway currently employs 650 team members and 350 of those are new hires.
AdventHealth continues to recruit additional physicians and advanced practice providers to the area to make it easier for patients to access high-quality care locally. The hospital system recently announced hiring four additional physicians in August to serve the Flagler County community.