A nonprofit Seventh-day Adventist health system with long ties to Western North Carolina is taking over the management and name of Polk County’s community hospital.
St. Luke’s Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital serving its rural WNC area since 1929, is slated to become AdventHealth Polk pending government review that should be finished by October, according to AdventHealth officials.
The change comes after St. Luke’s was awarded $2.8 million earlier this year for facility upgrades.
St. Luke’s had been managed by Atrium Health since 2008, but that Charlotte-based nonprofit withdrew from rural hospital partnerships, St. Luke’s Board of Trustees Chair Bill Miller told the elected Polk County Board of Commissioners, according to June 3 meeting minutes.
Miller said the board ultimately selected AdventHealth, a “faith-based, community-oriented organization focused on patient care over profit.”
Commissioners voted that month to allow St. Luke’s to sublease its county-owned land to AdventHealth.
Atrium spokesperson Brian Hacker on Aug. 27 called the health system “deeply invested” in Polk County and said they would work with AdventHealth closely on the transition.
“While the change in management means a change in our relationship, the people in Polk County continue to be important to us,” Hacker said.
The 300 employees of the hospital are to remain as staff. Asked about the details of the deal to take over management and assume a new name, AdventHealth spokesperson Victoria Dunkle declined to say.
“The financial details of the lease agreement are not available pending government and regulatory approvals. We are committed to a smooth transition, and upon approval, we look forward to continuing to serve the community,” Dunkle said.
St. Luke’s spokesperson Dean Graves said the board chose to adopt the AdventHealth name, because the health system has “a national brand standard” that Atrium did not 16 years ago.
Based in Altamonte Springs, Florida, AdventHealth is one of the nation’s largest faith-based health systems. It has 50 hospital campuses in nine states, including AdventHealth Hendersonville, a northern Henderson County facility taken over by the Adventist Health System in 1984.
In a statement, AdventHealth called St. Luke’s a top-rated community-owned critical care access hospital.
“We are excited about the opportunity to offer our unique promise of whole-person care to this community and look forward to working with and caring for the team members, physicians, patients and residents of Polk County and the surrounding area,” said Terry Shaw, the health system’s president and CEO.
While a small facility, St. Luke’s is one of the moves by various health systems jockeying for position in WNC. The biggest is for-profit HCA, the nation’s largest owner of hospitals that bought the nonprofit Asheville-based Mission Health for $1.5 billion in 2019. AdventHealth has won state approval to build a 67-bed hospital in northern Buncombe County and wants to add another 26 − but HCA and Novant Health, a Winston-Salem nonprofit, are also competing for those beds through the state’s Certificate of Need program that limits and regulates health care expansion.
The moves by Novant and AdventHealth comes as Mission/HCA has faced headwinds, including the unionization of nurses who now may strike, sanctions by federal regulators after patient deaths and a lawsuit by the state attorney general saying the Tennessee-based company broke its purchase agreement by failing to maintain emergency department, oncology and other aspects of care.
More:Mission/HCA still has chance to open South Asheville emergency room: NC Court of Appeals
Partisan split on pushing HCA to sell Mission Health? NC, US legislative candidates
Joel Burgess has lived in WNC for more than 20 years, covering politics, government and other news. He’s written award-winning stories on topics ranging from gerrymandering to police use of force. Got a tip? Contact Burgess at [email protected], 828-713-1095 or on Twitter @AVLreporter. Please help support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.
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