The final green light has been given to UF Health to build a hospital on Jacksonville’s Northside.
There is already a six floor medical office building under construction which will offer emergency care, diagnostic imaging services, operating rooms and more. That facility, on Max Leggett Parkway off I-95, is set to open early next year.
When that construction started, it was with the intent of eventually opening a hospital wing with inpatient beds. UF Health Jacksonville’s initial effort to open a hospital tower was initially approved, but then denied after Memorial Hospital filed an appeal.
UF Health North Associate Vice President Wayne Marshall says Memorial withdrew another appeal earlier this month, and the state has now issued UF Health Jacksonville its final approval for the certificate of need, which allows them to start construction.
“There’s nothing to stop it now,” Marshall says.
Memorial Hospital confirms to WOKV they made a “business decision” to not pursue any further objections.
The hospital will be a 92-bed tower which is targeted to open in 2017. Marshall says without the in-patient beds, any treatments that would have required long term attention would have been sent to another hospital location. Those services will now be provided for the Northside, which Marshall says is underserved.
“There’s no hospitals up there,” he says.
While the intent is to provide more convenient care for the Northside residents who now have to go in to Downtown or elsewhere to get care, Marshall says they don’t expect they will take a significant number of patients from the Downtown location.
"What we're going to be doing up there [on the Northside] will help support the valuable mission we have here on 8th Street," he says.
While the bottom two floors of the medical building already under construction will be for medical care, the top floors will contain offices for UF and community physicians. Marshall says funding for the building and the hospital wing are both being figured out by UF Health Jacksonville administration.
