Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH) recently spoke with the Arizona Daily Sun about the need for a new hospital and efforts to gather community input. The article below, published by the newspaper on Oct. 24, 2025, covers these discussions. It also highlights upcoming public listening forums on Oct. 29 and 30, where community members can share ideas for the future of the current Flagstaff Medical Center campus if the hospital relocates.
Northern Arizona Healthcare discusses need for new hospital ahead of planned community forums
By Abigail Kessler, Sun Staff Reporter
Leaders at Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH) are continuing to make the case for a new hospital in Flagstaff ahead of a pair of forums on reuse of the current location of Flagstaff Medical Center (FMC) should the hospital move.
NAH has been planning to build a new campus for FMC since 2021, though its plans have changed in response to a 2023 referendum.
The health care system, which operates FMC and Verde Valley Medical Center among its locations, has not yet announced a site for its current construction plans. It has said it is considering five options, with COO Bo Cofield saying the goal is to make a recommendation to the board within the next six months.
The reason for having the reuse forums ahead of that decision, according to NAH, is to address community concerns that arose during the first attempt at moving FMC. Those plans were put on hold after the referendum, and NAH leaders have said they have made changes to their approach to the project in response.
Next week’s forums are intended to gather input from the community on how it would like to see the space used if the hospital moves.
Whether the hospital should move and other topics related to the project’s potential location will not be part of the sessions, said Cofield and chief medical officer Rachel Levitan, though they also said that decision has not yet been made.
“We don’t want people to assume just because we’re asking this question that we’ve made a decision one way or the other,” Cofield said. “One of the things we heard from the community was if we were to propose to move, [they’d] like to know what we’re going to do with the existing space, and we’d like to know what that is so we can continue to work on those plans, if that’s the recommendation.”
NAH’s board will make a decision on the site selection following a recommendation from system leadership.
Cofield said that decision, should the board choose a site for FMC’s future campus, would be followed by some kind of event for community discussion or feedback.
NAH has already hosted two similar reuse forums for hospital employees — which they said had included a range of suggestions and discussion of the area’s unmet health care needs. Levitan added that she’d heard opposite responses to some of the suggestions, with people speaking both for and against the idea of housing on the site as an example.
Both Cofield and Levitan said NAH will be taking note of the feedback received in these forums and will be using it as a part of the decision-making process. They said the health care system’s focus has been asking about community needs in the years since the referendum.
“People are asking a lot lately, ‘What is the plan?’ and what I’ve been trying to get people to understand is the plan is that we’re listening and figuring it out,” Levitan said.
Site considerations
The question of rebuilding FMC on its current location was recently raised by Austin Aslan, a member of Flagstaff City Council who called for NAH to work with him and the community to find a way to do so.
Cofield said an analysis of what it would take to rebuild on site is currently underway. NAH undertook a similar analysis ahead of the initial announcement of its plans to move and so far, he said, the findings have been similar.
He also said the option of rebuilding on the current location had not yet been ruled out.
“The answer is still largely the same — which is that it’s doable, it’s very expensive,” Cofield said. “We’ll have to cut services for a period of time or cease performing certain services for a period of time, and you won’t be able to accomplish everything that you need on a timeframe that the community needs.”
One example he gave of a potential difficulty connected to building in place is the effect on traffic, both during construction and after the hospital is completed.
“Where [FMC] is today up on North Beaver Street, we already have congested traffic,” he said. “What is the traffic impact to having more hospital beds, which means more patients, which means more visitors, which means more supplies, et cetera, et cetera, not just during the construction project but actually operating the facility. If you’re bigger, more people will be using those streets. And are they big enough to accommodate that?”
As far as Aslan’s comments, Cofield said he hadn’t spoken with the councilman about them, so hasn’t asked him specific questions about his ideas. He gave similar answers when asked whether he thought any of the items Aslan proposed would remove barriers to building in place and if he thought Aslan had an accurate understanding of the needs associated with building a new hospital on the same site.
“We love the idea of his support for facilitating improved health care in northern Arizona, whether it’s on the current site or a different one,” Cofield said. “I think some of those things where he’s offering support are absolutely welcome and helpful, but we also want to ask the community. Does the community want us to build higher on our current location? We don’t know the answer to that question, and I’m not sure he does either. If he does, we’d love to hear it and see the data and understand it.
Cofield continued: “[We] look forward to continuing conversations with the council and with the city as we continue to move forward, but I don’t know how possible that is. Regulations have to change; how long does it take for regulations to change? I don’t think we know the answer to that question.”
Hospital needs
The reasons NAH originally proposed to move the hospital to a new campus still exist, Cofield and Levitan said, and they’ve grown in the over four years since the plan was first announced.
FMC is continuing to meet its patients’ needs, they said, noting its A hospital safety grade from the Leapfrog Group, which has received for five consecutive reports (these are released twice a year). Cofield attributed this to the quality of NAH employees and their medical decision-making.
“We have to stand on our heads and do cartwheels to make those kinds of outcomes, where it would be easier in a space where we had a little bit more elbow room,” he said.
He and Levitan noted that a patient’s experience of the hospital can also have an effect on outcomes.
The emergency department is one place where patient experience is affected by the needs created by FMC’s current space, they said.
“If you were to walk through our emergency room, it looks very similar to how it did 20 years ago, meaning we haven’t had the space to upgrade it, to make sure it had individual rooms and to insert some of the more modern, up-to-date things we would like to be able to do to best care for our patients,” Levitan said.
She outlined the typical experience of a patient coming into FMC’s emergency department (ED) and that of one who has the “ideal” ED experience based on current standards of care. That ideal experience can sometimes happen at the current hospital, Cofield said, but the limitations of the space mean “those days and times are fewer and farther between.”
In the ideal scenario, the patient comes to the emergency department and is quickly seen by all of the necessary health care workers in the department and then is admitted to the hospital. They then receive treatment and are discharged.
FMC as it is now has longer wait times in the emergency room — it is backed up, according to Levitan, because other parts of the hospital are full, so the ED needs to hold patients longer than it would otherwise. This also means patients might be moved to various places within the department during their wait, including hallways, spaces separated by curtains or windowless rooms.
“Once the decision has been made that the patient needs to be admitted, the hospitalist will come see them, but they may wait in our ED for sometimes up to a day, sitting in that area, waiting for an inpatient bed,” she said. “They will still be getting treatment, they will still be getting seen, but it is fragmented. They’re farther away from the floor they should be on, their care is getting interrupted for emergencies in the ER, they’re farther away from the testing, so just everything takes a little bit longer before they finally go upstairs or they may be discharged from that same space.”
A lack of space in the current hospital is contributing to the issue, Cofield said, noting that while state data places FMC as around 70% full, that includes specialized areas that can only admit certain types of patients. Adult general patient care, he said, is usually full.
Last month, Cofield said, FMC was unable to accept about 230 requests to transfer patients to its care.
Planned additions
While the specifics of what will be included in the new hospital cannot be determined until after the site selection, Cofield listed some items that are certain to be added to the new space in some form.
This includes a larger ED (with more private space and “enhanced” areas for triage and behavioral health) close to services, such as radiology, needed in the department’s work in order to move patients through more quickly. It also includes more inpatient beds in private rooms, rather than double-rooms.
There would be “no patients in hallways in the emergency department,” he added.
“We have patients in chairs in hallways, we have curtains that are keeping rooms from thoroughfares,” he said. “It would be great to have all private rooms in an ED as well.”
Cofield said FMC’s data indicates that, on an average day, it could currently use 35 to 40 more acute care inpatient beds. He added that having a larger emergency department would increase that need.
He said the hospital was conducting another analysis to see how many beds would be needed, and it could be 10% to 20% higher than the 350 included in the earlier version of the plans, as FMC currently has 270 beds.
That might not translate directly to a number of beds, Cofield said, depending on the site selected. He said even if the number appears lower than that total, the increased efficiency created by the new building would also expand FMC’s capacity to be able to meet the region’s needs throughout the lifespan of the new hospital.
A new campus would include additional space for technology — Cofield gave the example of the mobile MRI unit that FMC added to its services over the summer and is operating out of the hospital parking lot. Another example he gave is biplane angiography, a type of medical imaging that FMC does not currently have the capacity to offer, leading to difficulties in the recruitment and retention of neurosurgeons in addition to the impact on patient care.
The new hospital is being designed for the next 50 years, he and Levitan said, including space to add new technologies that become available in the future as well as to address projected growth in the region’s health care needs.
The hospital’s support spaces would also be upgraded — Cofield said the kitchen “is nowhere near enough” to support the current total of patients and employees, for example.
The design for a new hospital would also add more separation between the common and patient areas for privacy.
Operating rooms are another area that would expand in a new hospital.
FMC prioritizes patients based on their needs, Cofield said, but he also said it doesn’t currently have enough operating rooms or staff.
“There are times with multiple competing priorities for limited space, and we have to triage which patients go when,” he said. “Our staff can’t work 24 hours a day, seven days a week as individuals, and it’s hard to recruit and retain with the space that we have because we don’t have some of the modern equipment, we don’t have all of the space that some other facilities do and that requires us sometimes to lag behind operative cases. Not to the extent that it will harm anybody … but if you’re a patient, the first place you want to go when you get to the hospital is home. If there’s a delay in getting to the OR, that delays the amount of time we can get you home.”
More information about NAH’s plans for FMC can be found at nahealth.com/about-us/expansion. The community forums will be Oct. 29 and 30 in the McGee Auditorium on FMC’s campus. They will take place from noon to 1 p.m. Oct. 29 and from 6 to 7 p.m. Oct. 30.
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