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What Does Delaware Health Care Look Like, County by County?

Part of our Delaware Retirement and Second Home Guides.

By Bill Davis, Broker and Owner, Active Adults Realty, Lewes, Delaware. Published September 29, 2026. Figures and facility details on this page were checked September 29, 2026.

Prefer to read? The full guide is written out below.

Which hospital systems serve Delaware, county by county?

Four systems do most of the adult hospital work in Delaware, and a fifth handles children. All three counties are covered, but not the same way: New Castle has the largest hospitals, Kent is served mainly from Dover, and Sussex is served by several systems at once.

The state is also in the middle of a large hospital building program. ChristianaCare has announced $865 million in new investment in Delaware over three years, and Bayhealth's Kent Campus project, as filed with the Delaware Health Resources Board, is $236 million. Those two alone pass $1 billion, before counting what Beebe, TidalHealth and Nemours are building. Here is who is building what.

ChristianaCare

ChristianaCare is based in New Castle County. Its Delaware hospitals are Christiana Hospital in Newark, which has a Level I trauma center, and Wilmington Hospital. It also runs a 24/7 freestanding emergency department in Middletown.

It is now building in all three counties:

  • New Castle. A $75 million inpatient rehabilitation hospital at 140 Red Mill Road in Newark, with 73 beds, built with the Onix Group. The Delaware Health Resources Board has approved it, and ChristianaCare expects it to open in summer 2028. In Middletown, an 87,000 square foot health center is being built around the existing emergency department, with an expected opening in early 2027.
  • Kent. A $58.1 million health campus in Camden, on the west side of Route 13 just south of Lochmeath Way. About 38,000 square feet, with primary care, specialty care, an 8 bed emergency department and 8 inpatient beds. ChristianaCare says it opens in late 2028 or early 2029.
  • Sussex. A $65.1 million health campus at 20769 DuPont Boulevard in Georgetown, about 42,000 square feet. It is planned to include primary care, specialty care and behavioral health, plus a neighborhood hospital with 8 emergency beds and 8 inpatient beds. ChristianaCare says it opens in late 2028.

Bayhealth

Bayhealth is the Kent County system, and it reaches into Sussex. It runs Bayhealth Hospital, Kent Campus in Dover, Bayhealth Hospital, Sussex Campus in Milford, and a 24/7 freestanding emergency center in Smyrna.

On March 24, 2026 Bayhealth opened the first dedicated location of its Heart and Vascular Institute at 560 S. Governors Avenue in Dover. It brings Bayhealth's Dover cardiology and cardiovascular diagnostics into one building with 28 exam rooms, a congestive heart failure clinic, a coumadin clinic and pacemaker device support.

Bayhealth calls its expansion The Next Wave. At the Kent Campus in Dover, the patient tower grows to ten stories with 64 new private inpatient rooms, and the emergency department and ICU are being expanded. Bayhealth's state filing targets 2029 for the tower. At the Sussex Campus in Milford, Bayhealth plans a new Heart and Vascular Institute building, anticipated to open in fall 2027, an expanded cardiac catheterization lab planned for spring 2028, and a new medical office building.

Beebe Healthcare

Beebe is the Sussex County system based in Lewes. Its hospital, the Margaret H. Rollins Lewes Campus, is on Savannah Road in Lewes. It also runs a 24/7 freestanding emergency department at its South Coastal Health Campus near Millville, and it is building a health campus in Millsboro, covered below.

TidalHealth

TidalHealth is based in Salisbury, Maryland, and it has a Delaware hospital: TidalHealth Nanticoke in Seaford, with a 24/7 emergency department.

TidalHealth broke ground in July 2025 on a three-building, roughly 150,000 square foot outpatient campus near Routes 113 and 20 in Millsboro. The first building is planned to carry primary and specialty care offices, a pharmacy, a laboratory and diagnostic imaging. The full campus is planned to offer general surgery, urology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, neurology, cardiology, rheumatology, infusion, pain management and orthopedics. TidalHealth has not published an opening date. At groundbreaking it said the first building would take 18 to 24 months to build and the campus would be complete within about two years.

Nemours Children's Health

Nemours is the children's system, with Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware in Wilmington. It matters here for two reasons. It is the partner staffing the pediatric emergency rooms at Beebe's new Millsboro campus. And on April 7, 2026 it held the ribbon cutting for its Institute for Maternal Fetal Health in Wilmington, which houses Delaware's first surgical fetal care center. Patients were first seen there April 13, 2026.

Where are the emergency departments?

This is the question people ask second and worry about first, and we are not going to put a drive time on this page that we have not driven. What we can tell you is where the emergency departments are, county by county. All of the ones listed as open are open 24/7.

New Castle County

  • Christiana Hospital, Newark. ChristianaCare. Level I trauma center.
  • Wilmington Hospital, Wilmington. ChristianaCare.
  • Saint Francis Hospital, Wilmington. Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic.
  • ChristianaCare Middletown Emergency Department. Freestanding.
  • Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware, Wilmington. For children.

Kent County

  • Bayhealth Hospital, Kent Campus. 640 S. State Street, Dover.
  • Bayhealth Emergency Center, Smyrna. 401 North Carter Road. Freestanding, 7 beds.
  • ChristianaCare Camden. Planned, with 8 emergency beds, opening late 2028 or early 2029.

Sussex County

  • Beebe Healthcare, Margaret H. Rollins Lewes Campus. 424 Savannah Road, Lewes.
  • Beebe South Coastal Health Campus. 32750 Roxana Road, near Millville. Freestanding.
  • Bayhealth Hospital, Sussex Campus. 100 Wellness Way, Milford, at the northern end of the county.
  • TidalHealth Nanticoke. 801 Middleford Road, Seaford, in western Sussex.
  • Beebe Millsboro Health Campus. Under construction at DuPont Boulevard and Hardscrabble Road in Millsboro, near the North Millsboro Bypass. Plans call for a hybrid freestanding emergency department with 16 exam and treatment rooms plus two pediatric rooms staffed by Nemours, walk-in care, CT, MRI, ultrasound, mammography and X-ray, an on-site lab, a pharmacy and a helipad. Beebe broke ground December 17, 2025. Beebe has not published an opening date.
  • ChristianaCare Georgetown. Planned, with 8 emergency beds, opening late 2028.

Drive times are the thing to measure yourself, and to measure twice. The drive to Beebe in Lewes from a community off Route 1 on a Tuesday in February is not the drive you will make on a Saturday in July, and the drive into Wilmington at rush hour is not the drive at noon. When we show you a house, we will drive it with you at the hour you would actually be driving it.

What about specialists and how far do you travel?

It depends on the county. New Castle has the state's largest hospitals and most of its specialists. Kent is served mainly from Dover. For Sussex, the honest answer for the last twenty years was that routine care was local and anything specialized often meant a drive, to Dover, Newark, Wilmington or across to Salisbury. That is what is changing, and it is the real story in the building programs above.

Bayhealth has put its Dover cardiology into one Heart and Vascular Institute building and plans a second one at its Milford campus. TidalHealth's Millsboro campus is designed to bring orthopedics, endocrinology, neurology, urology and gastroenterology into Sussex County rather than over the Maryland line. ChristianaCare's Georgetown and Camden campuses are designed to put primary and specialty care in the middle of Sussex and Kent.

None of that is finished. Some of it is years out. If a specific specialty matters to you, the useful exercise is to find your named specialist first and then look at communities within the distance you are willing to drive to them, rather than the other way around.

What changes about Medicare when you move states?

Please read this first. Active Adults Realty is a real estate brokerage. We are not medical, insurance, financial, tax or legal advisors, and nothing on this page is advice about your health or your coverage. The general points below come from Medicare's own published guidance. For your own situation, talk to Medicare, your plan or Delaware's free counseling program, listed below.

In general terms, this is how Medicare treats a move, according to medicare.gov:

  • Original Medicare is national. With Original Medicare you can use any doctor or hospital that takes Medicare, anywhere in the U.S. Moving to Delaware does not change that.
  • Medicare Advantage and Part D plans have service areas. If your move takes you out of your plan's service area, you get a Special Enrollment Period to switch to a new Medicare Advantage plan or drug plan, or go back to Original Medicare. It begins when you move and runs for 2 full months after. If you tell your plan before you move, it begins the month before you move. The same window applies if your new address is still in your plan's service area but has new plan options.
  • Medigap generally moves with you. In general you can keep your Medigap policy wherever you live, as long as you still have Original Medicare. Medicare SELECT policies, which use networks, are the exception, and have their own rules if you move out of the area. If you move out of a Medicare Advantage plan's service area, federal rules also give you a limited window with a guaranteed right to buy certain Medigap policies.

Who can actually answer this for your situation:

  • Medicare itself. medicare.gov, or 1-800-MEDICARE.
  • Delaware Medicare Assistance Bureau (DMAB), formerly called ELDERinfo. It is Delaware's free health insurance counseling program for people on Medicare, run by the Delaware Department of Insurance with trained volunteer counselors. It is not selling anything, and it is the call to make before you move, not after.
  • Your own plan. Whether your specific plan covers your new address, and what its network looks like in the county you are moving to, is a question only your plan can answer.

The one thing worth saying from the real estate side is about timing. Make that call before you are under contract, not after you have settled. It is a short call and it occasionally changes which part of the state somebody chooses.

What should I check before I choose a community?

Five things, in this order:

  1. Drive to the nearest emergency department from the actual address, at the worst hour of the worst month. Write the number down.
  2. Find your specialists on the map before you find the house.
  3. Call your plan about its service area and network in Delaware. See above.
  4. Ask what is under construction near you and when it opens. A campus that opens in 2028 is not care you have in 2026, but it is care you have later, and it matters for a house you intend to keep.
  5. Ask about the house itself, not just the town. First floor primary suite, step-free entry, door widths, a walk-in shower. These are cheaper to buy than to retrofit.

Bring us the community you have been looking at, in any of the three counties, and we will map all of this against the exact address. If you are still deciding where in Delaware to land, our moving to Delaware guide covers the rest of the list.

Active Adults Realty
1504 Savannah Road, Lewes, DE 19958
Call 302-549-5164
Contact us

Active Adults Realty is an independent brokerage serving Sussex, Kent and New Castle counties, Delaware. Equal Housing Opportunity.

Sources

  • ChristianaCare News: "More Quality Care Closer to Home: ChristianaCare Announces $865M in Planned Investments" (July 2025)
  • ChristianaCare News: "ChristianaCare Plans to Build Health Campus in Georgetown, Delaware" (February 2026)
  • ChristianaCare News: "ChristianaCare to Build Advanced Inpatient Rehabilitation Hospital in Newark, DE" (March 2026)
  • ChristianaCare News: "ChristianaCare Advances New Health Campus in Camden, Delaware to Close Care Gaps" (April 2026)
  • ChristianaCare News: "ChristianaCare Announces Plans to Expand Health Care Services in Middletown, Del." (October 2024)
  • ChristianaCare Emergency Medicine Residency: "Training Facilities"
  • Bayhealth Newsroom: "Bayhealth Heart and Vascular Institute Celebrates Opening of First Dedicated Location in Dover" (March 2026)
  • Bayhealth Newsroom: "Bayhealth Leaders Share Vision for Expanding Access in Sussex County Presentations" (April 2026) and "Bayhealth Foundation Hosts Community Presentations Highlighting Expansion Plans" (July 2026)
  • Bayhealth location pages: Kent Campus, Sussex Campus Emergency and Trauma Center, Emergency Center Smyrna
  • Delaware Health Resources Board: Bayhealth Kent Campus additions, beds and renovations presentation (July 30, 2025)
  • Beebe Healthcare: "Beebe Healthcare Breaks Ground on Millsboro Health Campus" (December 2025) and South Coastal Health Campus page
  • TidalHealth: "Growing to Meet Our Communities' Needs" and TidalHealth Nanticoke location page
  • Nemours Children's Health newsroom: Institute for Maternal Fetal Health opening (April 2026)
  • Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic: Saint Francis Emergency Department
  • Medicare.gov: "Special Enrollment Periods" and "Compare Original Medicare and Medicare Advantage"
  • Medicare.gov / CMS: "Choosing a Medigap Policy: A Guide to Health Insurance for People with Medicare"
  • Delaware Department of Insurance: Delaware Medicare Assistance Bureau (DMAB)