Nemours Children’s Health plans expansion across Northeast Florida as pediatric population reaches 1.3 million (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — To keep pace with Northeast Florida’s surging population — including a count of roughly 1.3 million children, and growing — Nemours Children’s Health is preparing to stretch beyond its Southbank headquarters.
The pediatric health system is eyeing new clinics, specialty hires and potentially outpatient surgery centers to keep pace with demand already outstripping physician capacity, North Florida President Aaron Carpenter (pictured above) told the Business Journal.
Florida has the third largest pediatric population in America, with about 4.5 million total children under 18, according to the latest census data from the U.S. Children’s Bureau of The Administration for Children and Families — behind Texas and California.
“For Nemours, our geographic location from Northeast Florida across the Panhandle [and] Pensacola, is about 1.3 million children,” said Carpenter, pinpointing high-growth areas of focus like St. Johns County and western Clay County.
Collaboration over competition
In many ways, Nemours’ strategy mirrors neighboring system Baptist Health, which has also positioned itself to capture that growth under newly appointed CEO Matthew Zuino. It’s not by accident.
Wolfson Children’s Hospital recently expanded its partnership with Nemours, meaning its physicians staff various specialties at the Baptist-owned facility.
Beyond patient care, that also means the pair effectively co-create a pipeline for new physicians and nurses into the North Florida system. Nemours currently employs about 350 physicians.
“The recruitment challenges for Baptist on the adult side, and Wolfson and Nemours on the pediatric side, are pretty consistent,” said Aaron Carpenter. “There are fewer and fewer available number of providers for the population that we’re seeing, and so that’s really been one of our major challenges.”
Carpenter joined Nemours locally in early 2025, promoted after nearly a decade as senior vice president at the system’s Delaware Valley hospital.
There, with other major pediatric hospitals in close proximity, market competition for patients was a day-to-day focus, Carpenter explained. Market competition was fiercer with only about 200,000 children across the entire state — a fraction of the Jacksonville-area.
He echoes a perspective to collaboration shared with Baptist CEO Zuino.
“Wolfson has been in this community for decades and Nemours has been in this community for decades,” Carpenter said. “There’s a lot of investment that goes into the local operations and the local work of the healthcare systems here in Jacksonville that’s not distracted by major competition.”
Out and up
Much like other healthcare systems, pediatric and otherwise, Nemours wants to be closer to patients’ homes. That typically means constructing satellite clinics beyond core hospital operations.
To Carpenter, physical expansion means thinking about ambulatory surgery centers. Ambulatory centers, or ASCs, are freestanding facilities that provide same-day surgical care. But because Nemours requires pediatric anesthesiologists, it can’t operate from just any community ASC, he said.
Currently, Nemours partners with Baptist South’s ASC on pediatric surgeries but it’s an investor, not an owner.
From a capital perspective, that’s one area Carpenter says the health system aims to explore: “In the medium- to longer-term phases, are there locations outside of the downtown [campus] where we might want to stand up an ambulatory surgery center?”
A key component to Nemours’ growth ahead hinges on its ability to land donors and bring in philanthropic dollars — a community Carpenter called “exceptional.”
The pediatric system unveiled its renovated and expanded 8,500-square-foot otolaryngology center. The $6 million project was led by a $2 million donation by the Jack C. and Betty A. Demetree Family Foundation.
It was one example where the family had a strong connection to the cause they donated towards, Carpenter explained. Those gifts mesh with Nemours’ own capital put toward such projects.
At-large, First Coast healthcare systems are increasingly investing in large capital projects like towers, freestanding facilities and hospitality offerings, like hotels. For its part, Nemours’ goal revolves around, in Carpenter’s words, “creating the healthiest generations of children.”