New NCH Marco Urgent Care Center Prepares for its Debut

Real estate open houses on Marco Island are nothing noteworthy (unless it’s your house). But this one is special.

After a $20 million makeover years in the making, the NCH Marco Island Urgent Care is ready for its close-up. On Tuesday, October 28, NCH will hold an open house to introduce the new facility to the community. The public is invited to come and tour the premises, which, as Urgent Care Supervisor Kaitlen Magdalener MSN, RN-BC, pointed out, will not be possible once the new center is up and running, catering to patients.

Of course, they have been catering to patients all along – there was no gap in providing medical services, with the existing Urgent Care Center remaining open during the entire construction period. But the new facility, said Magdalener, will offer a substantial improvement in the level and variety of care provided.

“We will have 12 private exam rooms – no catch-all spaces anymore. We will have ultrasound capability – not available anywhere else on the island. We can already do CAT scans, which is unusual for an urgent care. We will have two negative pressure rooms,” instrumental in respiratory treatments.

“Upstairs, we will have 12,000 square feet of physicians’ offices. This lets us bring in more specialties – another cardiologist (along with the board-certified Dr. Edward Shmukler), orthopedics, gastroenterology, neurology, pediatrics, and general surgery.” These physicians will rotate in from various NCH locations in Naples, she said, providing an unprecedented level of medical care on the island. “It’s a continuum of care,” she said.

On Friday, Magdalener joined Dianna Dohm, chair of the NCH Marco Island Healthcare Center Committee, and Hilles Hughes, NCH community engagement specialist, to give a reporter a sneak peek at the new facilities. With workers swarming over the building inside and outside in the typical last-minute coming together before a construction project bumps up against a completion deadline, we couldn’t go inside, but as Magdalener pointed out, the equipment still hasn’t been installed, and there wasn’t a great deal to see.

Attendees on October 28 will be able to tour the facility, meet the staff without having to get sick or hurt first, get free balance screening, and possibly blood pressure checks. There will be refreshments, and the first 200 visitors will receive a complimentary pillbox.

Preventing falls is a new highlight at the NCH campus, with the Better Balance program helping keep the island’s population, many in their older years, upright and not tumbling to the ground. At their Marco Island campus on Heathwood Drive, NCH has a staff of 10 dedicated therapists, including physical, occupational, and speech therapists, under the direction of manager of therapy operations Hetty Toms, PT, DPT. Two are vestibular therapists, specially trained to deal with vertigo, a leading cause of falls.

The new 24,000-sq. ft. urgent care center building, at 40 South Heathwood Drive, across from City Hall, is just phase one of a complete makeover for the NCH Marco Island campus, which dates back 40 years. Once work on the new urgent care center is complete, the old urgent care building will be razed to provide necessary parking space, and the adjacent medical building will be brought up to current standards and remodeled to match the new urgent care.

The new urgent care center was designed by Walt Chancey of Chancey Architecture and Interior Design, based in Tampa. The general contractor is Waltbillig and Hood of Naples. The building, said Dohm, is built to the latest hurricane standards and expected to withstand anything nature can throw at it.

Hughes, community engagement specialist for NCH on Marco Island, pointed out that they have raised $11 million of the $20 million cost for the new facility, but that still leaves $9 million to go – although the nonprofit NCH system took out loans to finance construction, rather than waiting till all the funds were in hand. Major donors have included Steve and Barbara Slaggie, and Pat and Scot Kaufman.