Ceremony marks topping out of new wing at Sarasota Memorial Hospital Venice campus
VENICE – The new 102-bed patient tower on Sarasota Memorial Hospital's Venice campus is on schedule to open in the summer of 2024, as the public hospital continues to try to fill the gap created when ShorePoint Health Venice closed last September.
Sarasota Memorial Health Care System President & CEO David Verinder said the opening will almost double the Venice campus capacity, from 110 to 212 beds.
“We just thank our community for having patience with us because of the unexpected closure of ShorePoint, the hurricane which set everything a little bit back and certainly our board for stepping up and believing in our community,” Verinder said at a Wednesday morning "topping out" ceremony for the new, 181,000-square-foot, 80-foot-tall, five-story wing.
The hospital has been running near full capacity since it opened at the end of 2021.
SMH broke ground on the new wing in June 2021, with initial plans to build out 68 patient rooms, as well as surgical, cardiac and orthopedic care facilities on the fourth and fifth floors.
Related: SMH-Venice works to ease emergency wait times until larger facility can be built
In March, the hospital board approved funding to finish the 34-bed patient care unit on the second flood. Those beds should be available later in 2024.
The third floor of the wing is reserved for mechanical equipment, including air handlers, and the first floor will eventually be clinical and support areas.
About 1,000 medical professionals now work at the Venice campus.
SMH-Venice Campus President Sharon Roush said the hospital’s chief operating officer and chief nursing officer are developing a hiring plan to add several hundred more, with hiring anticipated to start in October, during the new fiscal year.
In addition to expanding the Venice campus, SMH is in the due diligence phase of planning a hospital and another medical facility in North Port.
It is also exploring opportunities to build a freestanding emergency room on the island of Venice and possibly another urgent care center in North Port.
The effort to meet local patient demand means that many who seek care at the Venice campus will ultimately end up at the 901-bed Sarasota campus.
“We’re still transferring quite a few patients up to Sarasota to deal with the capacity,” Roush said. “I think we sent 31 yesterday.”
To deal with the demand, the hospital expanded the emergency room into the preadmission testing area.
“We’ve had to improvise a lot with space,” she added.
In May or June, SMH should break ground on another expansion plan that should increase the size of the Emergency Department from 28 to 50, and increase the number of surgical suites from six to eight with enough shell space to add another eight surgical suites in the future.
That expansion is projected to open in the third quarter of 2024.
Wind and rainy conditions forced the topping out ceremony – which included construction workers and hospital officials signing a metal beam that will be placed in an elevator shaft – indoors.
That also gave hospital personnel who did not sign a similar beam Monday a chance to sign their name too.
But the indoor ceremony deprived attendees of using tablets containing augmented reality footage of the new wing in direct connection with the construction project, though the tablets were available on a nearby table.
“Instead of building a physical model and being tied to reality, we have overlaid it through video on the iPads,” explained project designer Nolan Christensen, an architectural associate with Flad Architects. “You can scan the surface, view the model on the iPads.
“You’re actually able to walk around and see in real time what that building will look like next to the existing building right there on site,” he added. “It validates our design decisions as we’ve worked with the client, worked with the contractors, worked with our team to validate this design.”
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota Memorial Hospital to add 102 beds to Venice campus
