JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Emergency care from Baptist Health and Wolfson Children's Hospital will be closer to home for Clay County residents beginning May 1, when the new Baptist/Wolfson Children's Emergency Center opens in Fleming Island.
Emergency physicians and staff from Baptist Health and Wolfson Children's Hospital will provide care in the center, which will be open 24 hours a day, every day, with 16 treatment rooms, a separate waiting room for children, child-specific medical equipment and imaging capabilities, a LifeFlight helipad and an on-site ambulance.
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The Emergency Center will be staffed 24/7 by a board-certified emergency medicine physician. Pediatric emergency medicine physicians affiliated with Wolfson Children's Hospital will be available during peak hours.
"We are proud to bring this new concept in health care to Clay County families. We have designed our full-service emergency center to serve both children and adults, combining the round-the-clock capabilities of our downtown hospital ER with the convenience of an outpatient, neighborhood setting in Fleming Island," said Ron Robinson, Baptist Medical Center South Hospital president and administrative leader for the new medical campus in Clay.
The 26,000-square-foot emergency center is the centerpiece of 32-acre Baptist Clay Medical Campus, located on U.S. 17 and Village Square Parkway. The campus includes Baptist Diagnostics & Imaging, providing laboratory services and digital imaging, including X-ray, CT, MRI, and ultrasound, as well as mammography and bone density. Scans will be performed with the lowest effective radiation dose -- especially important for children, officials said. They said children's images will be read by pediatric radiologists from Nemours Children's Clinic in Jacksonville.
Also on the campus is a three-story medical office building with primary care and specialist physicians' offices opening throughout the year, enabling Clay County families to come to the Baptist Clay Medical Campus as a "one-stop" destination for a wide array of care. Among the practices scheduled to move in between May and July of this year are Baptist Heart Specialists, Baptist Primary Care, Borland-Groover Clinic and Orange Park Pediatrics. More offices will follow later in the year.
A comprehensive new center for pediatric care, Wolfson Children's Specialty Center, will open in September, including expertise from Nemours Children's Clinic, Jacksonville, University of Florida College of Medicine-Jacksonville, as well as Wolfson Children's Rehabilitation.
The move into Clay County comes after requests from local residents for Baptist Health to increase its presence in the growing county. Many of these patients already come to Baptist Health and Wolfson Children's Hospital for their family's health care needs, officials said.
"We strive to provide the highest quality care that's easy to access for all residents of northeast Florida. This new facility allows us to help change health care for the better in Clay County by making our emergency and physician specialty care more convenient to the families who live, play and work here," Baptist Health President and CEO A. Hugh Greene said. "We look forward to being a bigger part of Clay County as a health system and as individual caregivers."
The public is invited to grand opening events at the Baptist Clay Medical Campus: an open house and tours on Tuesday from 6-8 p.m., and a Summer Health and Safety Fair on May 4 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (rain date: May 5 from noon to 3 p.m.).
Appointments are now being accepted for imaging tests at Baptist Diagnostics & Imaging on the Baptist Clay Medical Campus and can be made by calling 904-202-2222. More information is available at baptistclay.com.