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Rex Healthcare will open a wellness
center and health care facility in early
2008 as part of a larger health park
that will include a Harris Teeter, other
retail, hotels and a library. The
complex will be in the northwest corner
at the intersection of New Falls of
Neuse Road, Capital Boulevard and South
Main Street (U.S. 1-A).
The services Rex Healthcare
will provide include urgent care (but
not emergency care), outpatient surgery
and health care, therapeutic and
diagnostic services such as MRI, CT and
ultrasound, heart and vascular services
and cancer services.
The wellness center, which
will be open to the public, will include
fitness and rehab facilities with two
heated indoor swimming pools and a large
gymnasium on the second floor.
Although it will be in
Wakefield, “Our service area will be
much larger than one subdivision,”
Pamela A. Keels, the director of
Wakefield operations, said. Rex has
targeted the areas covered by 13 ZIP
codes in northern Wake County and
southern Franklin County as its primary
service area.
That area, with a population
of 134,300 in 2005, is expected to
increase by more than 19 percent by
2010. If Wake County alone is counted,
“we’re expecting a 22.5 percent growth
in the next five years,” Keels said.
After looking at both the
population growth and the demographics,
which are heavily weighted toward
pre-teen children and adults aged 35 to
54 with a growing number of older
adults, Keel said Rex decided “we could
offer services both for seniors and
children and young families.”
The hospital also used
insurance data about the health services
the area people had used in the recent
past compared to Wake County as a whole
to help determine what health needs are
being unmet.
They found, Keels said, that
while not as many people in the target
area had been discharged from a cancer
center, a great number of people from
the area had traveled 20 miles or more
to the main Rex campus in Raleigh for
cancer care. “We thought it would be
good to bring it to northern Wake
County,” Keels said.
Mayor Vivian Jones asked the
amount of indigent care Rex provides,
and Keels said it is about 20 percent
and does not include people who do not
pay their bills.
The main entrance to the
health care facility will be off New
Falls of Neuse on Forest Pines Drive,
and Keels said the land set aside by
Wakefield’s original developer for an
interchange at the intersection will not
be disturbed.
Commissioner Margaret
Stinnett asked about plans for skilled
or intermediate nursing care, and Keels
said space would be left for that to be
added but there are no plans now for
that type of care. The facility will not
have hospital beds. |
