BREAKING NEWS-- Hospital News!

For those of you who follow this Blog and my speeches in the area, last year at the Round Lake Area Chamber of Commerce meeting I made a call for a hospital in western Lake County. I assembled a Hospital Task Force chaired by Al Villasenor with Trustee Brian Brubaker, then planning commisioner Michael Blum, former trustee Dale Multerer and myself. We met and spent time with numerous hospital chains and heard all sorts of things ranging from vague to concrete. The most persistent was Advocate Lutheran General, we were able to trigger interest and a way forward.

The village board had been working towards the purchase of the land on the SW corner of Wilson and 120 for some time, with the aim of blocking off Volo's expansion down 120, and to gain control over the end of the 120 bypass. We had agreed to purchase it and had 4 options available to us the first was attract a hospital to the spot, the second was create a light industrial park, third was a mixed use commercial/industrial park and fourth was holding it.

Advocate was always the preferred user of the piece, and I am pleased to say that they are buying it from us, as soon as we complete our formalities with the land.

Needless to say this is huge for the village, rough estimates mean this will provide an addtional 1,000 primary and 2,000 secondary jobs for the area. I will blog more about this in a later post.

I can't tell you how happy I am for this project to be coming to Round Lake! This is some of the strategy and vision I have been slowly implementing in the area and its a pleasure to see it happening!

What follows is the Advocate Press Release from today

January 5, 2007 (Oak Brook, Ill)— Advocate Health Care today announced plans for the development of a new 144-bed acute care hospital in the Round Lake area of Lake County. Advocate is partnering with the Village of Round Lake and the surrounding community to expand access to vital, high-quality health care services.

“We are thrilled by Advocate’s commitment to increase access to quality health care for the Village of Round Lake and our neighboring communities,” said Mayor of Round Lake Bill Gentes. “This region critically needs a full-service hospital and Advocate will be a welcome partner in serving our needs.”

Advocate’s application to construct a hospital in Lake County is in direct response to the community’s call for increased access to care in a region with diverse health care needs and increasing population growth, projected to increase more than 20 percent in the next 10 years. It would fulfill the Lake County Board’s 2004 resolution to bring a new hospital to northwest Lake County.

“Health care access has not kept up with the rapid population growth in our community, and this has been a growing concern for me and the residents I proudly serve,” said Lake County Board Member Bonnie Thomson Carter. “Advocate is best positioned to respond to the health care needs of the region because of their expertise in cardiac and pediatric care, among other outstanding services.”

Advocate’s proposal builds on the nationally recognized, high-quality care the hospital system already provides in Lake County. Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital, situated in Lake County, was recently ranked first in Illinois for cardiac surgery and nationally ranked in the top five percent for overall cardiac care by HealthGrades in 2007. Advocate Lutheran General, a Level I Trauma Center consistently rated among the best hospitals in the country, has been providing critical services to Lake County residents for nearly 50 years, including comprehensive pediatric services though its children’s hospital.

“As a faith-based, non-profit health care organization, Advocate can continue fulfilling our mission to provide quality, compassionate care by helping close a regional gap in health care service.” said Jim Skogsbergh, President and CEO of Advocate Health Care. “If the state approves our proposal, the new full-service hospital will represent an investment of more than $200 million in Lake County.”

Advocate began the state regulatory process for approval of the proposed hospital by filing a letter of intent with the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board today. Advocate anticipates filing a Certificate of Need application to build the new state-of-the-art hospital in March.

Oak Brook-based Advocate Health Care, the largest health care provider in Illinois, is ranked among the nation’s top health care systems. A faith-based, non-profit system, Advocate is related to both the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Church of Christ. Advocate’s 200-plus sites of care in metropolitan Chicago include eight acute care hospitals and two children’s hospitals, a home health care company and four of Chicago’s largest medical groups. Through its academic and teaching affiliations, Advocate trains more resident physicians than does any non-university teaching hospital in Illinois. For more information about Advocate Health Care, please visit www.advocatehealth.com .

###

In addition there are numerous news articles about this out there. Here are three that I found immediately.

Crains Chicago Business
Daily Herald
Lakeland Media
News Sun

Obviously I will write a bit more about this as it evolves.

NOTE: Here are are some Saturday stories from the Daily Herald.
Here is another one from the Northwest Herald.