UF Health Shands Emergency Center – Kanapaha:

Kanapaha ER Groundbreaking

UF Health leaders broke ground recently on a new full-service, freestanding emergency room
in a heavily populated area southwest of Gainesville, providing patients with access to fast, high-quality emergency care close to home.

The planned 10,881-square-foot emergency center will feature 10 exam rooms, one room dedicated to trauma care and a full complement of diagnostic radiology and laboratory services, including CT scans. The center will be UF Health’s second freestanding emergency facility in Gainesville. In 2013, UF Health opened UF Health Shands Emergency Center – Springhill in northwest Gainesville. Since then, the Springhill emergency center has received 40,000 visits.

“We wanted to address the needs of our growing community, and to that end we built a freestanding emergency center at Springhill that provides accessible, high-quality emergency care where people work and live. With the new center in southwest Gainesville, we continue to make good on our commitment to patients in the region,” said Edward Jimenez, UF Health Shands CEO. “Our emergency medicine teams are committed to providing high-quality, efficient care, and we are excited to bring this care closer to residents in southwest Gainesville and Archer.”

UF Health leaders chose the new center’s location because a large number of patients coming to both the Springhill and UF Health Shands Hospital emergency care sites live in southwest Alachua County. The new center will give area residents convenient, 24-hour-a-day access to the full expertise of UF Health.
“Even though we think of this facility as truly a freestanding emergency center, there is a seamless connection to all of the subspecialty expertise available at UF Health. This is a powerful feature of our care delivery strategy and offers significant advantages over typical freestanding emergency department facilities,” said J. Adrian Tyndall, M.D., chair of the College of Medicine’s department of emergency medicine and chief of emergency health services at UF Health. “If there is a need for consultation or collaborative decision-making, such as in stroke care, we will have experts immediately available with access to electronic health records, imaging and other systems that will be integrated between our facilities.”

The freestanding center will receive 911 patients and, if needed, will offer a place for physicians to stabilize trauma patients before sending them to the Level 1 trauma center at UF Health Shands Hospital.

Located on Southwest Archer Road near Tower Road, west of Interstate 75, the new UF Health Shands Emergency Center – Kanapaha has a grand opening tentatively scheduled for October 2016.