A new emergency-care hospital is set to open in Smith County early this year. It will house the rural county’s first emergency room in two decades.
Smith County Emergency Hospital in Raleigh will provide 24-hour emergency services, observation care and outpatient radiology and lab work services. Raleigh is currently a 35-minute drive from the nearest emergency room.
The hospital will operate as a division of Covington County Hospital. The Collins hospital is a part of South Central Regional Medical Center’s partnership with rural community hospitals Simpson General Hospital in Mendenhall and Magee General Hospital, all helmed by CEO Greg Gibbes.
The hospital’s opening reflects Covington County Hospital’s “deeply held mission of helping others, serving patients and trying to do it in a way that would create sustainability,” not just for its own county, but also for surrounding communities, said Gibbes at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday.
Renovations of the building – which previously housed Patients’ Choice Medical Center of Smith County, an acute-care facility that closed in 2023 – are complete. The facility now awaits the Mississippi Department of Health’s final inspection, which could come as soon as next week, according to Gibbes.
The hospital hopes to then be approved as a “rural emergency hospital” by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
A rural emergency hospital status allows hospitals to receive $3.3 million from the federal government each year in exchange for closing their inpatient units and transferring patients requiring stays over 24 hours to a nearby facility.
The program was created to serve as a lifeline for struggling rural hospitals at risk of closing. Six hospitals have closed in Mississippi since 2005, and 33% are at immediate risk of closure, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.
Receiving a rural emergency hospital designation will make the hospital more financially sustainable, said Gibbes. He said he has “no concerns” about the hospital being awarded the federal designation.
Mississippi has more rural emergency hospitals than any other state besides Arkansas, which also operates five. Nationwide, 34 hospitals have received the designation, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services enrollment data. Over half of them are located in the Southeast.
The hospital will have a “significant economic impact” of tens of millions of dollars and has already created about 60 jobs in Smith County, Gibbes said.
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