Counting the Clock

Beginning on the front page of this week’s paper we begin the countdown to the opening of the Sacred Heart Hospital of the Gulf Coast.

This idea, to count down the weeks and days until the March 15 opening, came from members of the community board of directors for the hospital, which are assisting Sacred Heart Health Systems in the final laps to opening, including interviewing and planning.

Rightly, some of those members contend, this could represent the most significant development of the decade in Gulf County. Certainly the nascent ‘10’s, but in 10 years time we may very well be able to look back at the opening of Sacred Heart Hospital as the biggest event of the previous 10 years.

The community has been without a hospital of any kind for more than five years. It was Feb. 2005 when the state shuttered Gulf Pines Hospital.

When considering all the evidence concerning the “golden” 60 minutes, those ticks on the clock that in a medical emergency can be the difference between life and death, it is of no small consequence that a 24/7 emergency room will again be operating in the county.

Not just an emergency room, but a gleaming state-of-the-art facility.

Equipment is arriving nearly every day and the hospital will have the best of diagnostics, operating rooms and resources across Sacred Heart Health Systems to bring to bear. A heli-pad is just outside for those critical patients that need expert urgent care.

Sacred Heart is in the process of both partnering with local doctors and recruiting new doctors and nurses to the area, luring folks from around the region and as far away as Ohio.

And the hospital is creating more than 100 new jobs in an area where unemployment is over 10 percent, in a county that remains one of critical economic concern as labeled by the state, one that desperately needs the diverse economic base for which the hospital can serve as a foundation.

There remain skeptics.

There are those who feel the hospital is primarily a benefit for those on the south end of the county, that all that the hospital has meant for some is an improved health department facility in the north end and the same close proximity to Bay County hospitals.

We believe that time will demonstrate that this is truly a community hospital, that when the scales ultimately are balanced they realization will sink in that there is something to this keeping it local stuff and that the Sacred Heart Hospital on the Gulf Coast will offer the compassionate, speedy and thorough care that we all would hope to receive.

But looming over any debate about the relative merits of the hospital – if such debates have merit – is a simple fact: it is all becoming a reality.

The hospital is coming; the doors are going to swing open inside of 60 days.

Of all the economic engines discussed and debated over the years since the paper mill was shuttered, of all the ideas and hopes and efforts, this one is coming to fruition, this one is making the leap from conception to vision to bricks-and-mortar reality.

In that sense it is just about the best news to happen in this county in some time.

And therefore worth initiating the countdown to launch, to what we all hope is the signal of a new era in Gulf County.