Meet UF Health North
UF Health Jacksonville gets approval to build inpatient hospital on city’s Northside
By Tiffany Wilson
From 2000 to 2013, North Jacksonville grew 30 percent — more than double the growth rate of the rest of Duval and Nassau counties. Yet it is the only part of the greater Jacksonville area without an acute care hospital.
This is about to change. In July, UF Health Jacksonville received the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration’s final approval for its Certificate of Need to build a new inpatient hospital on Jacksonville’s Northside.
The 92-bed hospital tower, targeted to open in 2017, will add to the medical facility the organization is already building on Max Leggett Parkway, just east of Interstate 95.
“This is great news for residents in Duval and Nassau counties and Southeast Georgia,” said Russ Armistead, CEO of UF Health Jacksonville. “Our medical office complex will bring many high-tech services to those communities in just a few months, and now we can assure them they will have a brand new hospital built within the next few years.”
A six-story 210,000-square-foot medical office complex is already under construction on the 70-acre site and set to open in early 2015. The first two floors of the building will serve as the core of the hospital, while the recently approved Certificate of Need will allow UF Health to build an accompanying bed tower for inpatient stays, saidd Wayne Marshall, associate vice president of UF Health North.
The medical office complex that opens next year includes a 28-bed emergency room, five operating rooms, two endoscopy suites, a catheterization laboratory, interventional radiology, complete diagnostic imaging, a full laboratory and outpatient services. It will bring more than 170 new jobs to North Jacksonville.
“This will fill a great need for the community in North Jacksonville, and will also help support the valuable mission of
UF Health Jacksonville downtown,” Marshall said.
UF Health North will offer convenient access to both UF Health physicians and community physicians, providing a variety of health care services in one location.
“As UF Health North races toward completion in February we are eager to open this big, beautiful building on our new campus,” said Daniel Wilson, M.D., Ph.D., dean of the UF College of Medicine – Jacksonville. “UF faculty and staff are proud of our long legacy as the region’s academic health center with some 800 clinicians in multiple specialties. UF Health North will allow us to better serve this community and sustain our superb teaching hospital downtown.”