Plant City's South Florida Baptist Hospital in midst of $326 million move
PLANT CITY — South Florida Baptist Hospital has run out of real estate.
After 70 years, the hospital at 301 N. Alexander St. is still in operation, but a brand new facility is in construction four miles away east of East Sam Allen Road and North Park Road.
Since opening its doors in 1953, the South Florida Baptist Hospital has seen 12 major additions and renovations. Growth of the local community has pushed the hospital to continue expanding without much physical room.
“We were looking to expand, but we didn’t have the ability to build a tower or grow on site. The hospital is landlocked,” hospital President Karen Kerr said. “It’s aged infrastructure we would be dealing with.”
According to Kerr, the hospital considered a major onsite construction project that would have spanned seven years and disrupted daily operations before settling on a replacement facility.
The $326 million project broke ground in October and is expected to be completed in early 2024. BayCare Health System, an umbrella group for 15 Florida hospitals over a four county area, including South Florida Baptist, is footing the bill. BayCare also runs hospitals in Winter Haven and Bartow.
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The current hospital is 250,000 square feet, according to information provided by BayCare. The future location will double that at 420,000 square feet and have six floors. One of the biggest differences is the inclusion of private hospital rooms. Many of the rooms at South Florida Baptist Hospital are shared spaces, but all of the future hospital rooms (146 total) will be private.
If needed, the hospital will have space for an additional 30 inpatient and observation rooms.
The location will include 26 ICU beds, a 30-bed emergency care department, cardiac catheterization suites, an eight-bed surgery center and an OBGYN, labor and delivery center.
“It’s important for us to be able to provide top-notch care to help our patients, and essentially we’ll be able to do that in our new facility,” Kerr said. “The hospital is growing along with the community.”
The upcoming Plant City hospital will have technology on par with the latest BayCare facility, BayCare Hospital Wesley Chapel. The Wesley Chapel facility was completed earlier this year.
BayCare estimates the new location will employ 800 workers and more than 250 physicians.
“We’ll base our hiring needs on what the average daily patient census is at the time,” Kerr said.
In addition, the hospital is building an 85,000-square-foot medical office building. The building will have three floors, including space for physician and administrative offices as well as laboratory, imaging, adult rehabilitation, a wound and hyperbaric center and an infusion center.
Aside from a several-month delay because of COVID-19 staff shortages, Michigan-based major construction company Barton Malow has reported on time with the 2024 schedule. The land that South Florida Baptist will occupy was formerly an agricultural site.
“Parts of it were an agricultural site, and half the property had already been annexed into the city and zoned commercial,” Kerr told The Ledger.
What will become of the former South Florida Baptist Hospital location?
“We do not know at this point in time,” Kerr said.
Regardless, South Florida Baptist said it will not operate two facilities simultaneously.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: BayCare spending $326 million to move South Florida Baptist in Plant City
