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Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH) is continuing work toward planned changes in Flagstaff at the start of 2025, with CEO Dave Cheney saying he expects construction to start on the renovation of the Summit Center and the announcement of a new location for Flagstaff Medical Center (FMC) by the end of this year. 

The healthcare system also opened the new location of its primary care offices and sleep clinic at the NAH Health Clinic on Jasper Drive last week and plans to add an urgent care on the site eventually.

Cheney said the plans are part of a shift toward having ambulatory services available throughout the city.

It comes in response to feedback on the original plans to move the FMC campus next to Fort Tuthill County Park.

NAH had been developing plans for a new FMC campus at Fort Tuthill prior to a referendum held in November 2023. Those plans were first announced in 2021 and included a new hospital, ambulatory care center (ACC) and surrounding health and wellness village concept. After the project’s first phase of zoning received city approval in June 2023, Flagstaff Community First organized a petition to put a referendum on the rezoning on the ballot that November as part of a special election.

The group's effort was successful, as over 70% of Flagstaff voters voted against the measure (called Proposition 480).

“This is part of the result of us listening to the community, when they told us with the 480 vote that they didn't buy into ... the village concept," Cheney said. "So we’ve eliminated the village concept, and they wanted the ambulatory services dispersed throughout the community, not all in one location. ... [Now, we are] putting services where it benefits patients and the community in terms of easy access.�

He explained that healthcare has two settings: ambulatory and acute care. Ambulatory refers to outpatient services, while acute care is what happens inside a hospital. The previous FMC campus plan had included the ambulatory setting through the ACC and various medical offices and services that would have been part of the surrounding health and wellness village.

The hospital itself provides acute care.

Cheney has said that NAH still plans to move FMC to a new campus, though those plans now only include acute care through the hospital. He said NAH’s plans for Flagstaff are to move the ambulatory services into locations scattered throughout the community, alluding to plans yet to be announced in the central, eastern and western areas of Flagstaff.

He also cited recent and upcoming changes as part of this effort.

NAH has moved its primary care providers and sleep clinic to a new location on Jasper Drive -- which opened recently. The building, located about a mile east of FMC, is called the NAH Health Clinic and will also include an NAH urgent care.

“We’re hoping that by offering [urgent care] to the community, some of the less acute cases that are currently going to our emergency room and causing long wait times, those patients can be seen at urgent care," Cheney said. " …� [It will] be easier for them to get in and out and reserve the space at the emergency room for more acute care."

The healthcare system is in the process of growing its primary care offerings in Flagstaff, doubling its total of primary care providers from eight to 16, with plans to add more in the future.

Cheney said NAH had not yet decided on a use for the former locations of either the primary care offices or sleep clinic.

Summit Center renovations

Plans for construction of an outpatient surgery center at the location of the Summit Center (on Turquoise Drive, near the current FMC campus) are also part of the focus on having services throughout Flagstaff, he said. Cheney said he expected construction on this project to start sometime this year, with the center opening for patients in the summer of 2026.

The project is known as Northern Arizona Healthcare Orthopedic Surgery Center, or NAHOSC, which is also the name for one of the services currently offered in the building. 

According to NAH, the plans were approved for a permit from the City of Flagstaff on Jan. 7 after a plan review, with construction planned to start March 3.

The proposed timeline currently places the end of construction in August 2026, with the first patient seen in October 2026. 

NAH first announced its plans to remodel and expand the Summit Center into an outpatient surgery center in .

When complete, it will include an ambulatory surgery center consisting of six operating rooms, two pain procedure rooms and 32 pre-operation and patient care area bays. It will also include a wound and hyperbaric clinic, an orthopedic and neurosurgery clinic and a space for rehab and sports medicine physical therapy.

Cheney said he’s in the process of creating a strategic plan for NAH’s next three to five years, gathering information from “hundreds and hundreds of people� through focus groups, interviews and blind surveys, including from an outside company. This should be ready later in 2025, he said, though he added it would be “premature� to discuss the plan at the moment as he hadn’t yet gone over the data.

Cheney said one of the strategies in the plan will be to determine what will happen to FMC’s current location after the hospital’s move is complete. The plans for the current site and the new hospital will develop along “a parallel path,� he said, and both will include community feedback, “especially the community around the current location on what they would like to see here.�

Needs on the current campus

Removing the ambulatory services from the plans for the new FMC location has reduced the footprint of the overall campus but not the size of the hospital itself, Cheney said.

“The size of the acute-care hospital will still remain the same, if not slightly larger, just because the volume continues to grow," he said.

Because NAH has not chosen the hospital's location, he said it does not have the exact number of acres, beds or square feet that a new hospital would include.

The plans will be made with the specific site in mind once it has been selected.

“We’re still desperately short of space� in the current hospital, he said, citing as examples some equipment to treat stroke patients that doesn’t fit into the operating rooms, and patients who are still in double-occupancy rooms.

Cheney estimated it would likely take five to seven years from the beginning of 2025 until a new FMC campus was completed and open for patients. In the meantime, he said, FMC has been working to improve throughput (moving patients from admission to discharge) by lowering the amount of time patients stay in the hospital.

An example he gave that he said was common is if someone is ready to be discharged but hasn’t arranged for a ride home until a few days later. The hospital would attempt to reduce the amount of time this patient is staying by giving them an estimated length of stay when they are admitted and beginning then to arrange everything needed to get them home safely after being discharged. A patient could then leave the first day they are ready to be discharged, freeing up a bed for another patient's use.

Cheney said two of the greatest needs he saw at FMC right now are a lack of space and a need for additional physicians.

"Efficient operations" such as the above example is "the only thing we can do" to respond to the need for space in the current hospital, Cheney said. He said NAH's recruitment staff has been seeking "high-quality physicians that want to practice in the northern Arizona region and want to live here."

The increase in primary care doctors is part of this effort, he said.

"I've given instructions to our medical group to keep hiring primary care providers until I say stop, because we have such a shortage of primary care providers in northern Arizona that we need as many as we can get right now, so we won't stop at that number," he said.

Cheney said NAH has a waitlist for primary care.

Cheney also said "hiring is going really well" at FMC, with a decreasing number of temporary staff and locums physicians as the hospital hires more permanent employees. He attributed this more to individual doctors' decisions than changes made by the healthcare system.

Plans for a new FMC

Plans to move FMC to a new campus are still moving forward, Cheney said. He said this would include only the hospital itself and not the ACC or surrounding health village.

Cheney said NAH's board is considering four potential sites, though he did not provide specific locations, citing nondisclosure agreements with the site owners.

When asked about the 172-acre site next to Fort Tuthill that had been the location of the hospital move’s previous plans, he said NAH still owned the site, but would not confirm whether it was one of those under consideration for the next version of the plans.

He said NAH would "ideally" announce the location selected by the end of this year.

One of the priorities in selecting a site is access for both ambulances and helicopters, he said, adding that ambulance access to the current site can be difficult during the winter.

Cheney said NAH was still planning to include community feedback in its decision-making process as another set of plans to move the hospital develop. He was not certain whether that would include the site selection itself, or just the building on that site.

“It would depend on the site," he said. "Certainly we want as much input from the community as possible. So I’d like to think that we would involve them early and often once we get this narrowed down.�

He said NAH is not reevaluating the possibility of staying on its current campus. Reasons for this decision Cheney and other NAH leaders have given throughout the process of developing the original plans include the region's growing need for healthcare, a lack of space to meet current needs (needing to transport patients between units and across campus, for example, or that the rooms are double occupancy rather than private) and the fact that construction onsite would mean a need to pause or limit services that are currently being offered. 

He said those were all still barriers to building on the current site.

“I’ve heard loud and clear from the community that they do not want to shut this hospital down to rebuild on it,� he said. “Therefore, we can’t rebuild and keep the hospital open, so we are not exploring rebuilding on the site.�

He added: “Not enough space, not good access, can’t build and keep services open. There’s actually quite a list of reasons we can’t build on the hill."

In a later email, Cheney gave more detail on the reasons the hospital could not be rebuilt at its current location, and the ways in which its current layout cause difficulties in patient care.

He said these came from a study completed by healthcare architects in 2020 that found plans to renovate FMC from 2018 were "unworkable."

"They determined that the only way to stay at the current FMC site for the long term would be to close Beaver Street, tear down the existing structures (including negatively impacting behavioral health and oncology services) and build a new hospital," he wrote. "It would have to be several stories taller than the current four-story limit on the site, it would involve 12 years of continuous construction while drastically reducing how many patients we could accommodate and what medical services we could offer. Rebuilding on site would require widening Forest Avenue, as the main access point (which frequently is closed in winter storms), as well as removing the majority of onsite parking during construction along with bringing the parking demand of over 800 construction workers."

He added that this would also not improve access to the site for people coming from outside of Flagstaff who make up 60% of the hospital's patients.

More information about Northern Arizona Healthcare's plans in Flagstaff can be found at .