George Norcross had a question.
Imagine, he said, if Walmart was only open 9-5, Monday-Friday. Would that make sense?
The answer, of course, is ‘No.’
And yet that is more or less how Norcross said healthcare in the U.S. has operated for generations — building systems around the convenience of the provider, not the patient. Making families work around the schedule of the institution. Asking people to take time off work, burn vacation days, arrange for transportation and navigate a maze of specialists who don’t talk to each other.
Norcross, the Chair of Cooper University Health Care, has been thinking about this for a long time. The shift from inpatient to outpatient care has been building for decades — Cooper now generates roughly 60 percent of its revenue from outpatient services, Norcross estimated, compared to perhaps 20 or 25 percent when he joined the board 34 years ago.
The direction of travel has been clear. What hasn’t always been clear is how many organizations were listening.
Cooper clearly has been. Its answer is the planned $300 million, 184,000-square-foot outpatient campus in Gloucester Township the system introduced Wednesday. The plan is for it to be open seven days a week, including nights and weekends.
You need surgery on a Saturday? You can get it here. A specialist on a Wednesday night? Same answer.
“This facility is going to become a state-of-the-art, seven-day-a-week facility to care for our patients at nights and on weekends,” Norcross said. “We have to learn, in terms of delivering healthcare, that we need to provide for our patients in a way that’s convenient for them.”
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Gov. Mikie Sherrill showed up to the announcement. She made it personal.
It was easy to do, Sherrill said. She’s been living this healthcare hell.
Sherrill described the past two days of her life navigating healthcare for her own family. Her husband took time off work because two kids needed check-ups and the appointment slots were difficult. One of them needed lab work, which required a separate trip. One needed a specialist, which meant Sherrill herself had to duck out of work in the middle of the day to get there and back.
Two working parents. A governor and her husband. Barely managing.
“The time out of our schedules,” she said, “and that’s with two parents who actually can kind of schedule a little bit around that. I’m not working shift work, where I can’t get out of work to go handle that.”
Sherrill didn’t need to finish the sentence.
For families without flexibility — shift workers, single parents, anyone whose employer is unable (or unwilling) to accommodate — appointments get missed. The healthcare system, as it’s currently constructed, seemingly has built-in penalties for people who can’t rearrange their lives around it.
And here’s the deal: Sherrill’s story isn’t remarkable. That’s the point. Every working parent in New Jersey has lived that week.
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The planned Gloucester Township campus — with its evening and weekend hours, its concentration of specialties under one roof, its ambulatory surgery center designed for same-day procedures — aims to be an answer.
It will follow the model Cooper proved at its Moorestown campus, which opened in 2023 in a converted Sears at the Moorestown Mall and became a template for bringing care directly to suburban communities. The Gloucester Township facility is bigger, more comprehensive and more ambitious.
“We need to be bringing healthcare to our patients,” Norcross said, “not the other way around.”
Gloucester Township will do just that — starting in 2029.
