[Villages Kahuna]

I try to make it a point to stay up-to-date on the status of healthcare here in The Villages by asking my doctors or other healthcare providers.

Today I asked one of my doctors.about the status of the announced plan to make The Villages Regional Hospital a teaching hospital, training 24 new residents per year, beginning in 2024. It turns out that plan has been either tabled or scrapped altogether. UF Health has been unable to attract enough doctors and nurses to the area to operate the hospital, let alone train residents. They have had an ongoing national recruiting campaign for over a year, with almost no results. The responses to the recruiting campaign has been that younger doctors and those with school-age families don’t want to relocate to central Florida or The Villages.

But the biggest news from the docs was that UFHealth has withdrawn from the partnership with The Villages developer to build a larger teaching hospital in the south end of The Villages. It’s obvious that if the existing hospitals can’t be properly staffed, it would make little sense to build another even larger hospital in the same service area. The developer has begun to approach national chains to build the new hospital. But the national chains are likely to be aware of potential problems attracting enough doctors and nurses to staff a larger, new hospital.

I was left wondering, if UFHealth can’t properly staff The Villages Regional Hospital, how much longer will they remain committed to it’s ownership?

Don’t ever expect to read any of this in The Villages Daily Sun. Ask your doctors!