- November 22, 2024
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Access to medical care is an important piece of any healthy, thriving community — and Palm Coast is no exception. While Advent Health has a major footprint in the area (with two hospitals and a third campus on the way), there’s still a significant lack of speciality medical services within the city limits.
“How many of us in this community have to drive to New Smyrna, Orlando, St. Johns County or Jacksonville for medical services?” said Jeff Douglas, president of Douglas Property & Development. “Or we have to wait weeks or months for health services here."
In the 2019 Department of Health Flagler County Community Assessment, 42% of people said that mental health and counseling services were hard to obtain while 29% said alternative therapy and 25% said speciality doctor care such as a heart doctor. Almost 15% said it was difficult to obtain dental or oral care.
When asked what barriers were preventing people getting health care, 23% said long waits for appointments, 21% said a lack of evening and weekend services and 18% said that they can’t find any providers that accept their insurance. As someone who’s been tapped into Palm Coast for some time, Douglas believes that an increase in medical services is something city residents could really use.
“Ask anybody who tries to get a doctor’s appointment here,” he said.
This shortage of services will be addressed not only by the spin-off enterprises and businesses created by graduates of Jacksonville University and The University of North Florida Mednexus Towne Center campuses, but also by more DPD development.
“The existing [medical services] product is more of an urgent care nature,” Douglas said. “The new product is a retail-medical building component that will be on Central Avenue, and the second building, that will be across from the Central Landings, will be a medical building as well.”
While the future tenants of those units in the general medical office building are still being determined, Douglas said they’ve “had conversations with everybody from primary care to urgent care.”
“Those buildings are going to be strictly medical-educational. Everything from dental to urgent care to medical specialty."
The 2020 U.S. Census projected that Florida will have over 21 million residents by April of 2021 and over 23 million by 2025. Palm Coast gained over 14,000 people since 2010, and with the pandemic driving people out of major cities, that number is expected to increase.
“The fact is, we’re expanding,” Douglas said. “People are coming. People are here. And I think the people here who are consuming the medical services would agree that we’re at maximum capacity. So if you’re in the medical community, and you’re looking to expand your offices, we want to be your next office location.”
