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ORANGE PARK – Orange Park Medical Center soon will spend $126 million to add an additional 48 patient beds with enough extra space to keep up with the additional demands for the next 10 years.
The hospital announced Monday it will build a new 101,435-square-foot tower over the emergency room that initially will include two new patient floors that will increase the number of licensed beds from 317 to 365. Moreover, there will be two additional shell floors that can be transformed into additional patient rooms with future expansion, Orange Park Medical Center CEO Chad Patrick said.
“We’ve been here 45 years,” Patrick said. “We’ve been here through thick and thin. We needed the infrastructure to get ahead of everything for the next 10 years. We’re investing in our future.”
The new tower should be completed by spring 2021, the hospital said. The five-story project also includes a new electrophysiology lab, dining room and kitchen, medical office building and NICU expansion.
“We have seen a tremendous demand from the community,” Patrick said. “Last year we treated over 115,000 patients in our emergency rooms. The new patient rooms will help us provide care to more people in our community so they can stay close to home.”
As Clay County continues to grow, so do the needs of its residents, Patrick said. That’s why Patrick said the hospital’s parent company, HCA South Atlantic, decided to invest in OPMC.
“We want care to be provided locally to our patients,” Patrick said. “We don’t send our patients to other hospitals in other cities. We want these services to be kept here in Clay County. There is nothing that Orange Park can’t provide, except transplants, that any other hospital can provide. We want to keep it local.”
By over-building at the front end of the expansion, additional patient rooms can be added years from now without creating disruption for the patients and staff. And by paying up front, future expansion will be less costly, Patrick said.