It’s been one year since Pender Medical Center officially became part of the Novant Health network. And during that time, Novant Health got right to work with delivering on its promise to begin $50 million in improvements for the small community hospital in the heart of Burgaw, North Carolina.
“If it weren’t for Novant Health, we clearly wouldn’t be here,” said Ruth Glaser, president and chief operating officer of Novant Health Pender Medical Center. “When we became part of the organization, we were secured way into the future.”
Glaser, the hospital’s president since 2010, said Pender Medical Center’s developments, promised to take place over the next decade, will help it to serve the growing population of Burgaw, ensuring residents can access the care they need without a lengthy commute. Pender Medical Center is a critical access hospital, a rural hospital that provides a 24-hour emergency room, acute care, imaging, surgery and short-term rehabilitation services. The long-term goal is to further modernize and develop Pender Medical Center into a general hospital to include inpatient services, like labor and delivery and intensive care.
“Novant Health understands rural health care,” Glaser continued. “I’m really excited about seeing what’s to come. Now we have a vision for the future – a future that’s much brighter and more robust than the past 14 years I’ve been here.”
The 25-bed Pender Medical Center is celebrating a grand reopening after a period of renovations in 2024, the first phase of its ongoing improvements. Here are two more ways the hospital is expanding its care to serve the Burgaw community.
Experience comprehensive care close to home at Pender Medical Center.
Introducing Dr. Andrew Justice, new hospitalist medical director
For Pender Medical Center’s new hospitalist medical director, Dr. Andrew Justice, working in a small community isn’t just a professional interest, it’s a personal love.
“I’ve always had a passion for rural medicine,” he said. “It brings a lot of joy for me.”
Following his medical residency at University of Utah School of Medicine, he lived and worked on a Navajo Nation reservation on the Arizona-New Mexico border, a job he describes as “a wonderful experience in a beautiful place.” There, all the community’s doctors lived within about 100 yards of where they worked.
Serving the Navajo community further spurred Justice’s interest in public health. His experience helped him understand the “big picture” of how health care access is foundational to a community’s stability, and how a lack of it can create social inequalities. He went on to practice medicine in Sierra Leone and Rwanda.
A native of the Piedmont area, Justice was drawn back to his North Carolina roots. Prior to beginning his new role at Pender Medical Center, he worked as medical director of the Duplin County Health Department.
For 2025, one of his goals is to increase the hospital’s current imaging services, like CAT scans, electrocardiograms (EKGs) and ultrasounds. This, he said, will help achieve the paramount goal of keeping people close to home for the full spectrum of their care.
Justice also said the newly completed renovations to several areas, including patient rooms and the kitchen, are a “huge step forward” in developing the medical center into a community general hospital.
Glaser said Justice understands the value of rural hospitals and is committed to making Pender Medical Center the best it can be. “Taking care of patients is what fuels him,” Glaser said. “I’m over-the-moon excited that he’s here.”
New infusion center
Pender Medical Center will open a new freestanding outpatient infusion therapy center in early 2025. Infusion therapy, the administering of medications through an intravenous line, is used to treat numerous conditions, including anemia, asthma, heart failure, inflammatory bowel disease, migraine, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
People across Pender County regularly travel 45 minutes to Wilmington for infusion therapy, Glaser said. “We know individuals and their family members will appreciate having this needed care closer to home.”
The center will operate from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. It has four infusion bays and room for future expansion.
Facility leaders are also planning other ways to expand services. Pender Medical Center will repurpose its previous skilled nursing unit on the second floor to prioritize acute care and other services while continuing to offer short-term rehabilitation.
“This will allow us to focus on vital expansions in hospital-based health care services to reduce the need for patients to travel for care,” Glaser said.
To boost rural medicine in Pender County, Novant Health is also spearheading a new rural track of its family medicine residency program in partnership with UNC School of Medicine and Black River Health Services to begin during summer 2025.
