HAINES CITY | Heart of Florida Regional Medical Center is preparing to display a $25 million expansion that’s made the hospital five floors tall instead of three.
The additional floors add a combined 65,000 square feet to the building’s existing 206,000 square feet, increasing its total by almost one-third.
The fourth floor, with jazzed-up patient rooms and a focus on total joint replacement, is set to go live with surgical patients soon after Labor Day.
That gives Heart of Florida another 52 beds, bringing it to 194 total, the third-largest number in Polk County.
Conversions of other rooms will bring the hospital to 200 beds before long, Chief Executive Officer Jim Beatty said.
When the fifth floor is occupied, that total will grow to at least 250.
“We need the space,” said Beatty, whose hospital is in the high-growth Northeast Polk area.
The hospital’s 800 or so employees, along with its 200-plus volunteers, will have an opportunity to see the fourth floor Wednesday. Chamber of Commerce officials, elected officials, the medical staff and other invited guests will be there Aug. 21.
A new sign, The Joint Replacement Center at Heart of Florida, will be one of the first things visible on the fourth floor. Joint replacement patients will recover on that floor, as will patients receiving laparoscopic mini-gastric-bypass surgery and other surgery patients who can’t go home the same day as their surgeries, Beatty said.
“We’re doing a little bit of extra decorating in the rooms to make it look more upscale and comforting,” said Linda Vendel, the hospital’s marketing director.
Almost all the fourth-floor rooms will be private, she said.
“It’s so gorgeous,” said Cheri Hempel, a registered nurse. “The rooms are very spacious.”
Other amenities on that floor will include some couches that convert into beds, window blinds that joint-replacement patients can operate from their beds, a dining area for those patients and, in the physical therapy room, an automobile model on which patients who receive total joint replacements can practice getting into and out of a car.
“They built this center in an effort to accommodate the large joint replacement service,” said Dr. Samuel S. Messieh, an orthopedic surgeon who is Heart of Florida’s director of total joint replacement.
Some extra features are for family members whose relatives get joint replacements, which Messieh said typically means a three-day stay there.
He and Drs. Paul Dowdy, Nathan Hill and Mark Goodwin do joint replacements at Heart of Florida. They did 665 in the past 12 months.
“Patients come from throughout (Polk) County as well as surrounding counties,” Messieh said.
The interior of the fifth floor will be a shell until some other building and rearrangements take place.
The current plan is for the fifth floor to become the women’s and children’s services area. Work will start there in 18 months to 24 months, Beatty said.
It doesn’t take much persuading to get hospital officials talking about their future plans, which include:
Moving the medical unit now on the second floor onto the third floor and making other related moves.
Building a new materials-management building beside the hospital.
Adding four new operating rooms to the current six for the 8,000-or-so surgeries done there.
Beatty said the new building and operating rooms will cost about $10 million combined.
Patient rooms on the second and third floors also will be upgraded gradually, he said.
[ Robin Williams Adams can be reached at robin.adams@theledger.com or 863-802-7558. Read her blog at robinsrx.theledger.com. ]
