PENN TOWNSHIP — Southern Chester County residents can exhale a sigh of relief after being without local emergency care in the region since Jan. 31, 2021. That’s when Tower Health closed the doors of Jennersville Regional Hospital. Elsewhere, Tower Health also closed Brandywine Hospital in Caln Township.
Three years and nearly seven months later, there’s hope for localized emergency care again in the Jennersville community.
Along Old Baltimore Pike in Penn Township, the site formerly known as Jennersville Regional Hospital will reopen this summer as ChristianaCare Hospital — West Grove campus.
ChristianaCare invested $21.6 million to purchase the former Jennersville facility and reimagine the hospital from the ground up. Much of the old building was demolished and elsewhere, a bulk of the existing structure was completely gutted and rebuilt into a neighborhood hospital.
This state-of-the-art facility now spans 20,000 square feet and will offer 24/7 emergency services, access to advanced virtual consults in specialties such as neurology and cardiology. It also houses an all-new 10-bed inpatient unit, within the footprint of the old structure, that is contemporary in design and bright in tone. The emergency department is equipped to treat injuries, heart attacks, strokes and falls.
ChristianaCare announced on July 25 that the new facility will open mid-August.
“We will be opening our doors for the families in this community with a steadfast commitment to being their trusted health care partner,” said Janice Nevin, president and chief executive officer of ChristianaCare. “We’re grateful for the opportunity to bring love and excellence to those we will serve.”
Besides the residents of Penn Township, the reopening of a hospital at this location will also provide emergency services to residents of New London, Oxford, East Nottingham, West Grove and Avondale, London Grove, Londonderry and London Britain and Franklin and New Garden in Landenberg will benefit. The hospital is also a few miles away from Lincoln University in Lower Oxford Township. In Kennett Square, there’s been an advertisement truck announcing that ChristianaCare is opening a neighborhood campus just a few miles south.
ChristianaCare worked in partnership with Emerus Holdings, the nation’s leading developer of neighborhood hospitals, to bring this dream into fruition.
“For the past several years, bringing emergency room care back to Jennersville has been my number one priority,” said state Rep. John Lawrence, (R-13th Dist.). “Working together with local, county, state, and federal officials, and the leadership at Christiana Care, today we celebrate an incredible milestone for Southern Chester County with the opening of a brand new hospital, and a brand new emergency room for our community.”
Lawrence said a great deal of effort and hard work went into bringing this new hospital to fruition.
“Now, it is ready to serve our community for the next generation,” he added.
The project benefitted from grants awarded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Chester County Commissioners Josh Maxwell, Marian Moskowitz and Eric Roe.
“The opening of ChristianaCare’s new hospital in Jennersville is a vital step forward,” Moskowitz said on Tuesday. “This facility brings high-quality accessible care back to a community that has gone too long without it. We are grateful for ChristianaCare’s investment in our region and their commitment to the health and well-being of our residents.”
New Model of Care
While healthcare has evolved since the nation’s founding in 1776, some constants remain.
“We are here to serve,” said Dr. Vinay Maheshwari, physician executive, growth and strategic partnerships at ChristianaCare. “We’re here to make patients feel better, to make patients have better health. That’s a constant. That was there 250 years ago — that will be here 250 years from now.”
“This is our first neighborhood hospital,” said Pauline Corso, president of ambulatory network continuity and growth at ChristianaCare. The organization is building two similar facilities in Delaware County within the communities of Aston and Springfield.
“This neighborhood hospital brings the right mix of services to support the health and well-being of our neighbors,” she said.
“We are a micro hospital,” she said. We can take care of any emergency. However, we do not have intensive care or an operating room.”
She said if a patient needs a higher level of care, teams will deploy support for that person to be transferred to a full-service hospital.
“What inspires me as a nonclinical leader is that I know I can make decisions and advance projects that will ultimately make people’s lives better, and that to me gets me up every morning knowing that I can make a difference,” Corso said.
“Our intent is to continue to invest and grow with the community,” she said.
“We want to be here for generations to come and in choosing the micro hospital model it creates a more financially sustainable model,” Corso stated.
Job Growth
The neighborhood hospital will employ 90 people, including nurses and clinical specialists, plus a rotating staff of board-certified emergency physicians. ChristianaCare hired 22 former Crozer Health employees, including three emergency room doctors, to join the team in Penn Township. The healthcare group’s vision is poetic: “love and excellence.”
“ChristianaCare is uniquely positioned. It really is about strategic growth and doing it differently. So being innovative, lowering the cost of care, focusing on what the highest areas of need are, and not trying to be all things,” Corso said. “Many community hospitals are struggling because you’re not able to sustain the cost when you don’t have the level of acuity or the volume of patients to support that cost.”
Headquartered in Wilmington, Del., ChristianaCare was founded in 1888 as Homeopathic Hospital. The organization sees more than 1.7 million patients annually across the region.
Local Heart
On the ground, Kathleen Ramirez will run the facility in her role as the West Grove hospital administrator. She worked at Jennersville hospital prior to Tower Health’s ownership, which began in 2017.
Ramirez called the closure of Jennersville hospital nearly four years ago “devastating.”
Ramirez lauded the emergency service workers at Medic 94 and across the region from Union paramedics in Oxford to Longwood providers in Kennett. She noted that the EMS community in this area has suffered a serious strain from the closing of the old hospital.
When the ChristianaCare facility opens next month, Medic 94 will provide ambulance services with advanced life support. Ambulances with emergency patients are expected to arrive at the new facility from as far away as Cecil County, too.
“We want to help people,” Ramirez said, calling medical providers resilient.
When Tower Health closed Jennersville hospital, the nearest medical emergency room was an average 40 minutes away in any direction. That changes in August. Ramirez said the caregivers hired to join the organization’s West Grove campus have been on site getting ready.
“The energy is unbelievable,” Ramirez said. “The nurses and doctors inspire me. They have the heart.”
