GLASGOW – Stethoscopes and medical charts were traded for hard hats and shovels on Thursday as Med Center Health turned dirt on its forthcoming expansion into Glasgow, located on South L Rogers Wells Boulevard.

“This is a huge day, a big day for Med Center Health,” said Wade Stone, executive vice president of MCH, during the ceremony. “More importantly, it’s a big day for residents of Glasgow, Barren County and neighboring communities.”

Stone said MCH has been using some space in Glasgow for “a number of years,” but Med Center Health Glasgow will be the organization’s first outpatient facility located in Barren County and the first to provide specialty services.

“This will be the first building dedicated to those specialty services as well as primary care and outpatient diagnostics,” Stone said.

He said the new facility will allow MCH to continue combating the nationwide physician shortage, especially with regard to specialty services.

“As Med Center Health has evolved into an academic teaching institution we’ve been able to successfully recruit many of those specialties and grow those programs,” Stone said. “We can deploy those specialists to other rural communities, Glasgow (and) Barren County being one of them.”

MCH Glasgow would also allow patients to complete pre-op and post-op procedures locally, instead of having to commute to Bowling Green.

“Transportation can be such an obstacle for patients,” Stone said. “This will make those services available closer to home.”

Those seeking medical care will not be the only ones staying close to home, Stone said.

“Some of the physicians who will care for patients at this very site in the years ahead will have perhaps grown up in Glasgow and Barren County, received their medical training 30 miles from here, and will have chosen to return home to care for their very own,” Stone said. “And that’s important.”

Stone said “three to four” full-time primary care physicians will practice out of MCH Glasgow, along with some practicing specialty services.

Paul Moore, a 30-year cardiothoracic surgeon in Bowling Green, will be one of those physicians practicing at MCH Glasgow.

He said he has been treating patients in Barren and surrounding counties for the past six or seven years, but described MCH Glasgow as a “central location.”

“I’m at the point now where I want to get out and see the patients that really need access to the care I can give that is not given locally,” Moore said. “I see the children and grandchildren of people I operated on 30 years ago, and it’s so wonderful.”

MCH Glasgow is expected to open in the spring of 2025.