Pensacola's new Baptist Hospital is ready to open. Here's what it looks like.

Moving day is almost here for Baptist Health Care. Construction is finished on the new 10-story, 602,000-square-foot hospital in Brent and members of the media were given a tour of the state-of-the-art campus.

From top to bottom, the brand-new facility is spacious and includes one-of-kind features, high-quality finishing touches and a “soothing” color palette. There’s also abundant natural light from the floor-to-ceiling windows installed throughout the hospital.

The result is a modern, open feel that hardly looks like a hospital and was purposely designed that way to create a “healing and supportive environment” that enhances Baptist Health Care’s mission of “helping people throughout life’s journey,” and provides quality healthcare for the community.

“Our vision is to be the trusted partner of the quality communities that we serve,” said Mark Faulkner, Baptist Health Care president and CEO. “That means that the confluence of that vision, the good quality of life and our local nature, that's the lens we look through when we make decisions like how to respond to a pandemic, like how to build a replacement campus, and the embodiment of all those factors is what you were in today, this new campus.”

Patient rooms are located on floors 3–10. There are 264 patient beds in the new hospital: 54 intensive care unit, 198 medical/surgical, and 12 labor and delivery suites. They are spacious and private and designed to be more comfortable for individuals and families. They include a sleeper sofa and workspace for visitors.

They’re also equipped with the latest in modern technology, giving patients the option to control the room’s lighting and temperature. It’s all in keeping with the clean, safe, modern environment of the rest of the campus.

On the fifth floor, there are 12 suites for labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum care and each suite has a laboring tub. There are also four obstetric emergency rooms, two cesarean-section rooms and a nursery.

On floors six through 10, there are specialized medical/surgical units for a variety of units including orthopedic, neurosurgery, bariatric and oncology. Each of those upper floors features 36 patient rooms on each floor, which have similar décor and amenities as the other rooms including private bathrooms, soothing colors, artwork and convenient access to care.

The Behavioral Health Unit also offers 72 beds for adults and children needing inpatient treatment.

"Thanks to our legislative delegation, we do have now a sustainable funding for a central receiving, two-facility system and as Allison Hill and her Lakeview team are opening up the adult central receiving facility,” explained Jen Grove, Baptist vice president of external affairs, ”and when that happens we will still receive all children and adolescents. Then we will become the child and adolescent central receiving facility, so only anybody up to age 18 would come here in the future and then anybody 18 and older would go to the Lakeview facility.”

Construction on the new hospital started In July 2020, and John Porter, vice president of construction services for Baptist Health Care, said they are proud of how much they accomplished in that time.

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“It's hard to imagine, literally just over three years ago, where we are right now was a lite industrial park and we took that industrial park and we've turned it into 57 acres for the hospital site that we have today,” Porter said. “We came in with 1,200 pilings that we drove, 4,000 truckloads of dirt to raise the pad elevation, relocated overhead power lines and the workmen also started on this site and here we are, September of 2023 and we are ready to experience a very remarkable facility.”

The campus also includes the 178,000 square foot Bear Family Foundation Health Center. The six-story building will be home to Baptist Cancer Institute, cardiac rehabilitation, Baptist Heart & Vascular Institute, Baptist Medical Group, offices and other services.

The Henderson Health Building is still under construction but will include medical offices for additional physicians.

Administrators also talked about the history of the project and how building the new facility at the site off Brent Lane next to Interstate-110 was actually the third option. The first two options included looking at ways to renovate and upgrade the hospital and medical towers at Baptist’s West Moreno Street campus or build the new hospital there, but Faulkner said the plans weren’t cost effective or feasible.

The new $650 million dollar hospital facility is 200,000 square feet larger than the old one and was funded with a combination of bonds, hospital operational revenues and philanthropy. There’s also room to grow and expand on the new property.

Additional Features

Additional features of the new hospital include a town square style open space with heritage oaks, magnolia trees, benches and walking paths.

Baptist provided a privately owned bus stop shelter and Escambia County Area Transit created a new route to serve the campus.

Dots are placed on the building’s many expansive windows to help birds see them and avoid flying into them. They’re also built to withstand winds from a Category 5 hurricane.

The new hospital also has a café, gift shop and chapel.

Making the Move

Starting Sept. 23 at 3 a.m., Baptist Hospital emergency room at E Street will close and the new one at Brent Lane will open. Patients will be transported throughout the day beginning at 5 a.m. and the move is expected to be finished by 5 p.m.

Staff have been training and preparing for the move for months. EMS will be used to move patients, something they already do every day but not at this large of a scale, which is why administrators had table-top exercises in advance to walk through the process of moving patients from the old campus to the new one.

“Throughout that full cycle, we've practiced on different types of patients at the old campus, loading them up, the nurse hand off to EMS, how that would work and then we practice arriving those patients here at the campus,” said Brett Aldridge, Baptist Health Care senior vice president. “So, the preparation of planning that has gone into this has been incredible and it's really hard to relay all of the detail and time and energy and effort our team spent on it, but it has been nothing short of incredible.”

Friday, Sept. 22, will be the last day of services provided at Baptist Towers at the West Moreno Street campus. Monday, Sept. 25, offices and services at Bear Health Center will be closed and reopen the following day.

Baptist President and CEO Mark Faulkner said the staff is excited about the move.

“Our community is growing and evolving and changing in exciting ways and for me, I think healthcare is an important piece to community infrastructure and it's an important piece to quality of life that is helping to elevate the communities that we serve,” Faulkner said.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: New Baptist hospital in Escambia County offers state-of-the-art care