Sarasota Memorial Hospital Venice campus still on pace to open for patients in 2021

VENICE – Construction  of the new Laurel Road hospital for Sarasota Memorial Health Care System continues to progress on schedule for the facility to open toward the end of the year.

“It’s exciting now that the hospital is taking shape, you can really start to see what the corridors are looking like and what all the departments are looking like and patient rooms as all the drywall is going up and cabinetry is going in,” said Sarasota Memorial Hospital-Venice President Sharon Roush. “You can really visualize it as a place that’s going to provide real great patient care, and I can almost imagine rounding our patients and rounding our staff as you walk through the hall.”

Construction of the 82-foot tall, 365,000-square-foot hospital started in April 2019 at the southeast corner of Laurel and Pinebrook roads.

When finished this fall, the new hospital will offer a full array of medical and surgical care, including: Cardiology Unit/Catheterization Lab; Critical Care/Intensive Care Unit; Emergency Care; Endoscopy & other procedural areas; Gastroenterology; General/Vasular Surgery; Labor & Delivery/Post-Partum Unit; Laboratory/Diagnostic Testing; Nephrology; Neurology/Neurosurgery; Oncology; Orthopedics; Pulmonology; Imaging/Radiology and Urology.

The hurricane-hardened facility has its own central energy center, which went online with Florida Power & Light last month and will be capable of providing power in the event of a hurricane.

A 60,000-square-foot medical office building and 400-space parking garage are all part of the 65-acre campus. 

The facility is expected to cost roughly $255 million to build and another $182 million to equip, making the total startup cost about $437 million.

Roush said that the contractor – Gilbane Construction and subcontractors, along with Flad Architects – have been able to overcome COVID-19 pandemic-induced supply chain delays to keep work on track.

“I’ve been very impressed; our team really employed some very innovative strategies over the past couple of years to keep the project moving, especially in light of the pandemic,” Roush said.

One example was to prefabricate corridor areas for HVAC, mechanical, electrical and plumbing at an off-site warehouse near Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport for later installation on the campus.

Those units are then installed in the access way between hospital floors.

Because of the prefabrication, workers could assemble the corridor racks at a comfortable eye level, instead of needing to work on it overhead.

“Normally, all the duct work with all these multiple trades – plumbers, electricians, HVAC – they’re all overhead, they’re all on ladders, working in the same space,” said Roush, who oversaw the construction of Capital Regional Medical Center in Tallahassee about two decades ago.

“It’s something that is relatively new; it’s the first time that I’ve seen it,” she added. “It takes a lot of coordination up front.”

That coordination is a result of three-dimensional building plans created through Building Information Modeling.

The contractors were also able to modify construction of the new hospital to incorporate lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, on the advice of Dr. James Fiorica, the hospital’s chief medical officer. They expanded the number of negative pressure rooms, which prevent air from a patient area from flowing into the rest of the hospital.

“Our intensive care/step down unit, which is 22 beds, we can either convert a portion of that – 10 beds, 11 beds or a total of 22 beds – and make them all pandemic mode, which is negative pressure,” Roush said.

“Typically, a hospital our size would have four to six negative pressure rooms,” she added, referring to the Venice campus, which is slated to open at 110 private patient suites, a 28-bed emergency center and eight surgical suites.

It can expand to include 300 private patient suites, 16 surgical suites and a 50-bed emergency room.

One goal of the expansion is to bring Sarasota Memorial’s physician base farther south and help build the medical staff for a future hospital in North Port.

Because the state of Florida did away with the previous approval process for new hospitals, SMH can keep the downtown Sarasota hospital at 839 beds and not transfer 90 beds to Venice, which had been originally planned.

That will come in handy, Roush said, because Sarasota Memorial is already eyeing expansion as the growth rate for its projected south county service area, which includes portions of Palmer Ranch south through North Port, have outpaced initial estimates.

The hospital started a schedule to staff the new campus last summer. Most manager slots have been filled, and about 100 employees have been hired and will start work over a period of six months.

The new campus will be staffed both by new hires and people transferring from the Sarasota facility.

Sarasota Memorial’s human resources department has the task of handling that, making sure replacement hires are made for the main campus and hiring to staff a new eight-story, $193 million oncology tower that will be the heart of the hospital’s cancer institute.

That, too, is anticipated to open near the end of this calendar year.

“So HR has a big job,” Roush said.

Earle Kimel primarily covers south Sarasota County for the Herald-Tribune and can be reached at earle.kimel@heraldtribune.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription to the Herald-Tribune.