Century of Innovation
LEE HEALTH'S MEDICAL CAMPUS NEWEST ADDITION TO HOSPITAL'S 100 YEARS IN SOUTHWEST FLORIDA
L ee Health’s journey to a planned 2018 opening of its Lee Health-Coconut Point campus in Estero began, in a sense, more than a century ago and about 18 miles to the north.
That’s where and when the system’s first hospital opened in Fort Myers, in an era long before MRIs or arthroscopic
surgery or even air-conditioned operating rooms. The century-old creation story of Lee Health (Lee Memorial Health System’s new name since October), includes a bonfire, a shot gunto ting Lee County commissioner, a mob of 150 men and more colorful elements.
The first patient in the hospital system rode about 30 miles by horseback from LaBelle to the hospital, where an emergency appendectomy was performed by the light of a kerosene lamp. The patient’s name was Sam Thompson and the surgeon’s was Daniel McSwain, who journeyed by train from Arcadia that night to operate and returned home in the morning.
When the original hospital opened on Oct. 3, 1916, Estero and Bonita Springs were remote outposts without railroad service or paved roads, let alone a hospital. Now, 100,000 people live in the two communities. Residents need more health care and more convenient health care, particularly an emergency room. Sam Thompson, gripped with pain as he rode his horse through
the woods, needed an emergency room in 1916 and knew where to find one—in Fort Myers.
It wasn’t in Bonita Springs. Or Estero. Not then. Not now. But sometime soon an emergency room will sprout in southern Lee County.
That original hospital was built a century ago thanks to some shenanigans the likes of which would go viral in 2016. The Lee County Commission voted 3-2 in 1914 to build a new courthouse. Some in the county opposed it. So while some of those opposed rode a train to Arcadia seeking a court injunction to stop the plans, Commissioner Bill Towles gathered 150 men one night and they took apart the old courthouse, plank by plank. The lumber was saved and turned into the county’s first hospital. When the 172,000-square-foot Lee Health-Coconut Point medicalcare campus opens next to Coconut Point Mall it will include an emergency room, one certainly built without old lumber from a dismantled building. Patients likely won’t arrive on horseback and surgeons definitely won’t operate by the light of kerosene lamps.
That day in 2018 when health site opens will signal a new era in health care for Estero and Bonita Springs. “We’ve felt the need for this for many, many years,” Estero Mayor Nick Batos says.
Residents have never seen anything like what is coming in south Lee County, which exists in a medical twilight zone middle ground between Health Park Medical Center in south Fort Myers and Naples Community Hospital’s location just off Immokalee Road in north Naples.
Emergency medical care can be difficult to secure. “During season it could be a half-hour drive,” Batos says.
The planned-for health complex wasn’t Lee Health’s original goal. Most Estero and Bonita Springs residents likely know that Lee Memorial Health System had hopes to build a hospital in the area. That plan failed to materialize because NCH protested to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and Lee Memorial’s request was denied in 2013. So Lee Memorial went to Plan B—a sprawling health campus.
Years of planning, work and fundraising were needed before the system’s first hospital opened in 1916. Fort Myers civic leaders began discussing how to build a hospital in 1912 and it took a little more than four and half years from the first meeting to the grand opening for the system.
The pattern that was set more than a century ago has been mirrored in the 21st century as Lee Memorial—now Lee Health— officials worked to find a site, purchase it and plan a health complex. Ground will likely be broken in the spring.
Lee Health-Coconut Point
Convenient health care in south Lee County has been a long time coming. Former Bonita Springs Mayor Ben Nelson says his family moved to the town in 1959, when he was 5. At the time, he recalls, U.S. Route 41 was a perilous two-lane road that connected Bonita’s roughly 3,000 people to the larger communities of Fort Myers and Naples.
Medical care in Bonita Springs when he was a boy in the 1960s was virtually nonexistent, Nelson recalls. “Maybe one doctor in Bonita,” Nelson says. “An old-time M.D.”
But the remote little town has blossomed into a vibrant, upscale community of more than 51,000 residents.
It needs more than old-time M.D.s. Enter the contained healthcare concept. Lee Health describes it as an “innovative healthcare campus.” In addition to an emergency room open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Lee Health-Coconut Point will also include a clinical decision unit, wellness center, physicians offices, ambulatory surgery center, imaging tests, lab testing and rehab services.
“The concept is good,” Nelson notes. “I think it will be really successful. Look at the customer base.”
Lee Health officials have been looking for years at the south Lee County customer base. They’ve worked with the Estero Council of Community Leaders and others to reach this place where Lee Health-Coconut Point is less than two years away from reality.
It’s also about far more than helping “customers.” It’s about providing health care quickly and efficiently.
“Services, particularly during season [when] transit times are longer and I think folks that are down there are fearful that it takes too long to get to an emergency room,” says Kevin Newingham, Lee Health’s chief strategy officer.
He also mentions the fact that south Lee County has 100,000 residents. For now. “It’s definitely growing,” Newingham adds. The initial hope, of course, was to build an 80-bed hospital. “The state found against us,” Newingham says. “We were not approved to build the hospital. We subsequently challenged that and through a long legal process was unsuccessful in that as well.”
NCH’s challenge, though, was successful. “So basically, it was the state saying they agreed with Naples Community,”
Convenient health care in south Lee County has been a long time coming.
Newingham explains.
But what about health care right there in southern Lee County, in that void between the two large health systems?
“There were still unmet needs,” Newingham says. “They still have 100,000 people there. They still have challenges accessing emergency services. I mean, there is a whole host of health care needs that were still being unmet.” So Lee Health officials went another route. “We basically initially positioned it as a hospital without beds,” Newingham says. “We’ve kind of got away from that language but essentially that’s what we’re doing and we’ll have just about every service down there that you could envision in a hospital with the exception of a bed tower.”
Lee Health, which employs more than 12,000 people, is already operating a facility in Estero, the Healthy Life Center at Coconut Point Mall. It opened in 2015 but doesn’t provide emergency care or other medical services that Lee Health-Coconut Point will provide.
“It’s really a means to provide education to the community,” Newingham says of the Healthy Life Center.
Molly Grubbs, director of the Healthy Life Center, is looking forward to moving that facility into the larger Lee Health-Coconut Point campus. When the center moves it will even have a retail space.
“Almost Apple-like store,” Grubbs says, referring to the sparkling Apple Store, which is located at Coconut Point Mall.
When the day comes sometime in the middle of 2018 it should change life in south Lee County. Marlene Fernandez, a director of the Estero Historical Society, says her family moved to the community in 1956, when she was 17. She enrolled at Fort Myers High because that was the nearest school.
The only hospital was the Lee Memorial location on Cleveland Avenue in Fort Myers. “It was a hike,” Fernandez says.
Medical care then was not something one typically sought in Estero. “It was difficult getting good medical attention back then,” she adds.
Soon, more medical attention will be available in Estero than anybody could have dreamed of when Fernandez was in high school. And just as was the case for the system’s first hospital a century earlier, people in the community met, planned and organized.
The work has paid off. Susan Lindenmuth, public relations manager for Estero Fire Rescue, says people in the community have worked for many years trying to get an emergency room. In a couple of years there will be one, right there by Coconut Point Mall and just about on the Estero-Bonita Springs city line. “It’s going to mean great things,” Lindenmuth says. Bonita Springs resident Peter Bergerson, a professor in Florida Gulf Coast University’s political science department, views the creation of Lee Health-Coconut Point in his part of the country as a good thing.
“Absolutely,” Bergerson writes in an email. “The area has seen a tremendous growth and with the opening of Hertz International headquarters, more people will be moving to the immediate area. We need a more comprehensive health care facility beyond the walk-up ‘greet ’em, treat ’em and street ’em’ volume-based health care facilities we now have.
“A health care [village] would be a plus not only for those needing the services, but also their families and at-home caregivers.”
Yep, 100,000 people in the two towns—plus visitors—could mean many potential patients. “There’s definitely a need,” Batos says. That need will soon be met.