Following the announcement of the merger between St. Claire HealthCare and the University of Kentucky, the hospital’s leader is making the rounds. Don Lloyd, President and CEO of UK St. Claire, said he is embarking on a speaking circuit throughout the region for the next several weeks.
One of his first stops was at Morehead City Council, where he conducted a presentation about what the future of St. Claire looks like in Rowan County. Lloyd said the investment will be transformative.
“If you think about the next 60 years for our kids and our grandkids, what this opportunity will bring, it will not be the same little sleepy town that we have today when you make hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of investments,” said Lloyd.
Lloyd said one of the biggest projects is the construction of a new hospital and clinical education building on St. Claire’s Morehead campus.
“We will be building a new replacement institution. It will be somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It will be a minimum of 300 million dollars invested in this region, sometime over the next six years and that’s just on the clinical infrastructure side,” said Lloyd.
The new building is one of the larger investments, but Lloyd said the healthcare system is doing much more than that. St. Claire plans to expand programs from five of the seven UK colleges of health, bringing them to Morehead.
UK St. Claire is adding 22 new physicians to their workforce this summer and anticipates an even larger period of employee growth as they expand operations in Morehead and surrounding communities. Lloyd said this kind of growth will require the cooperation of local governments across the region.
