After years of construction and planning, Baptist Health Care will open its new campus in Pensacola this weekend.
The new hospital and healthcare center has been in the works for years. The formal announcement of the project to the public came on June 26, 2019, from Baptist Health Care President and CEO Mark Faulkner who announced the news in a press conference touting a "brand new, state of the art hospital and health care campus for generations to come.”
The target date given for the opening of the new hospital was the summer of 2023. This weekend, they will make that deadline with minutes to spare.
“So on September 23 at 3 a.m., we will close the emergency department at our old campus, and the very next second, we will open the emergency department at our new campus,” said Brett Aldridge, senior vice president at Baptist Health Care and administrator of Baptist Hospital.
Once the new emergency department is established, inpatients from the E Street location will start to be moved to the new hospital.
“We expect to begin our first patient transport at about 5 a.m. on September 23," said Aldridge. And we will complete this move in one day."
Baptist will have 16 ambulances split into two convoys dedicated to the move, and the Escambia County Sherriff’s Department will escort them along the planned move routes. The plans are for the move to be complete by early Saturday evening.
“The following day, the hospital will be open to the public under normal operations,” said Aldridge. “And then on Tuesday, September 26, the Bear Family Foundation Health Center will open and we’ll begin seeing outpatients in our provider clinics.”
Those inpatients and outpatients will be seeing a modern, state-of-the-art, 600,000-square-foot facility. That compares to 400,000 square feet at the E Street campus.
“Everything about this is bigger,” said John Porter, vice president of construction services at Baptist Health Care. “Some of that is driven by code. Every time construction codes update they add more square footage. They require corridors to be wider, O.R.s to be larger, the list goes on. But a lot of the space increase was deliberate design on our part to be sure that we have the circulation space so that our clinical staff and family and patient can have the space they need to provide the care that they need.”
The buildings were also designed to have natural light pouring into the buildings.
“If there is an exterior wall, it’s got a window,” said Porter.
Four years have passed since the announcement of the new healthcare campus to this week’s opening, but the planning has been going on much longer.
“In 2016, we did a master facility study of our main campus with the vision of renovating that current campus to meet the needs of modern healthcare,” said Faulkner. “Not surprisingly, that study came back and said ‘no.' (It would mean spending) hundreds of millions of dollars and you’re still left with the campus challenges (and) the bones of the building. It would not be wise.”
Then came Plan B. Baptist commissioned another feasibility study, this time to look at replacing the hospital at the current E Street location. Again, the answer was no. There was not enough space and, as Faulkner put it, it was like “changing your tire while driving down the road."
So they turned to Plan C, moving to a new location. Everyone involved wanted a location that was large enough to accommodate their plans but was still inside Pensacola.
“And that brought us to this property,” said Faulkner. “Thirty-two parcels, 57 acres, none of which was for sale when we started this journey.”
Even with the opening of the new Baptist Health Care campus, there are already plans for further expansion. There is a new building currently under construction on campus. Named the Henderson Health Center in honor of a $1 million gift from Chad and Brooke Henderson, it will house independent providers who want to set up shop near the new facility.
In addition, the campus was designed to accommodate new buildings that would fit seamlessly into the existing structures.
“You’ve been through hospitals that have grown through the years, and our main campus is no exception, they become a labyrinth. Very confusing,” said Faulkner. “(On) this campus, literally a second bed tower goes right next to the first bed tower. Straight up. Same entrance.”
The new $650 million Baptist Hospital and Bear Family Foundation Health Center is located on Brent Lane and Interstate 110 in Pensacola.
