South Lake Hospital has announced expansion plan including emergency and surgical department expansions at the main hospital and the addition of two new satellite campuses in south Lake County near Orlando.
The hospital, in affiliation with Orlando Health, says it will build a free-standing emergency department in the busy Four Corners area and an urgent care facility in its northern service area. “The hospital will also expand the capacity of its emergency and surgical departments on its Clermont, FL campus,” a news release reported.
Hospital president John Moore indicated in the March announcement an aggressive construction timeline, with all three projects scheduled to be completed within 18 months. In a more recent Orlando Business Journal article, the expansion’s value has been pegged at $50 million.
The hospital expects to solicit contractor bids this summer, hospital community relations manager Kim Couch told the business publication. Little Diversified Architectural Consulting is the architect for the satellite campuses, and HKS Architects is designing the main campus expansion.
“We’re expanding our services so that patients in all areas of south Lake County have improved access points to health care,” Moore said in March. “These plans are driven both by current needs and projected future needs, based on the accelerating growth of our county.” Lake County’s population is projected to increase more than 12 percent in the next four years, according to 2010 census data.
In Four Corners, a facility to be named the Joe H. and Loretta Scott Health Pavilion at Southlake will include a full-service emergency department staffed by board-certified physicians. The pavilion will also offer outpatient imaging, laboratory and rehabilitation services and has been designed to allow for more services to be added in the future. The pavilion will be located at the juncture of U.S. Highway 192 and U.S. Route 27 and is part of a master-planned development with physician offices, restaurants and residential apartments being developed by Exploria Resorts.
South Lake Hospital also announced plans for a health pavilion approximately 13 miles north of its Clermont campus, where U.S. Route 27 intersects with the northbound entrance to Florida’s Turnpike. This pavilion will initially include an urgent care facility, outpatient imaging, laboratory and rehabilitation services, as well as space for physician offices. It has been purposefully designed to accommodate more advanced services as the need in this area grows.
Moore also unveiled plans to expand the hospital’s Clermont campus. This fall, construction crews will break ground on additional exam rooms and several new observation rooms in the hospital’s emergency department, nearly doubling its treatment capacity. The project comes at a time when the hospital is treating nearly 12,000 more patients in the emergency department than it did just five years ago.
As part of the same campus expansion, South Lake Hospital will add three additional operating suites and upgrade its four existing suites, adding new technologies and equipment. The upgrades will make it possible for surgeons to treat more complicated cases.
The expansion news comes less than two months after the UF Health Cancer Center Orlando Health opened on South Lake Hospital’s 180-acre Clermont campus. In 2015, the hospital opened a 30-bed short-term rehabilitation center
