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TGH: FLORIDA’S HOSPITAL
TGH:
Florida’s Hospital
Improving patient care and expanding facilities to reach more Floridians are the focus of the hospital’s half-billion-dollar master expansion plan
BY DAVE SCHEIBER
From left: Expanded cancer care offerings at the Brandon Healthplex will include a new clinic space; the Bayshore Pavilion will offer 100 more beds and 12 new operating rooms. Above: Dr. Lucian Lozonschi, director of cardiothoracic surgery
When John Couris, Tampa General Hospital’s president and CEO, looks to the future, he sees a road map for an extraordinary journey. It is one that will lead TGH to a destination of heightened prominence in the delivery of cutting-edge care—not only in the region and state but the nation.
Paving the path forward is an ambitious master facility plan, the largest in the hospital’s history. And as the plan rolls out in three phases over the next five years, it will allow TGH to meet the needs of patients in Tampa Bay and far beyond with unparalleled effectiveness and agility.
“Our vision is very straightforward,” Couris said. “It’s to be the safest, most innovative academic health system in the country. And part of that vision is to modernize facilities and improve capacity, to bring in new technology, to build new services and buildings, and to invest in our people. That’s really what the master facility plan does: allows us to invest in innovation and support the creation of tomorrow’s TGH.”
The master facility plan is the physical manifestation of the hospital’s strategic plan, and it began taking shape in late 2017 and early 2018. Ultimately, TGH will invest $550 million in upgrades that will benefit patients throughout Florida, have an estimated economic impact of more than $976 million for the Tampa Bay area, and create nearly 6,000 new jobs.
In the process, it will expand TGH’s geographic footprint, while fueling the “vertical” growth of new buildings and improvements to existing infrastructure on its 30-acre grounds, comprising some 3.6 million square feet and including more than 85 locations off the main TGH campus.
Kelly Cullen, TGH’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, is leading the development of the master facility plan. A former emergency room nurse whose career experience was shaped by bedside care, Cullen sees her work on the plan through the lens of what’s best for patients.
“Everything we do is with the patient’s best interest at heart, so if we make decisions with the patient at the center, we’re going to do a great job,” she said. “Tampa General is not just the leader in the local market, but we also serve patients statewide and beyond. And as we grow, we have to make sure that we have the right capacity, the right pathways of care,
Inset: Expanded and renovated burn ICU Below: TGH will create 12 new operating rooms and renovate others.
and the right talent in place to take care of these patients.”
One of the Phase 1 enhancements—a new intensive care unit—opened in June 2021. The $17.5 million project added 34 rooms with advanced care technologies encompassing some 27,500 square feet. Other planned upgrades include: ●
Bayshore Pavilion vertical expan-
sion: The project will add four floors to TGH’s Bayshore Pavilion, resulting in 12 new operating rooms and 100 new beds. ●
Regional Burn Center renovation
and expansion: With an anticipated completion in late 2022, this project will provide larger rooms, more efficient layouts, and a new design. ●
Renovated main operating room
suite: To include modernized operating rooms with upgraded equipment. ●
Main campus renovations: To include renovating the main lobby and adding meeting space. ●
Freestanding emergency depart-
ment: Located on one of Tampa’s main thoroughfares, Kennedy Boulevard, a mile from the hospital’s main campus, the 15,000-squarefoot facility will provide additional emergency capacity to serve community needs. ●
TGH Brandon Healthplex Cancer In-
stitute: The Brandon Healthplex is located
John Couris
Kelly Cullen
Above: TGH continues to invest in the most innovative surgical technology available. Right: TGH leaders celebrate the opening of the Central Energy Plant, which will help ensure the hospital’s safe operation during extreme weather.
10 miles from the main campus and serves suburban communities. This new clinic space will be added to provide multidisciplinary integrated oncology services, to include diagnostic testing, new and expanded treatments, and support services. Additional new treatments, such as bone marrow transplants and other cellular therapies, also will be offered at the TGH Cancer Institute. ●
Purchase of Hillsborough Community Col-
lege Davis Islands building: Adjacent to the main hospital campus, this building will be outfitted for administrative, education, and training purposes to free up additional clinical space. ●
Central Energy Plant expansion: The $53 million project will expand power generation capabilities to provide 100 percent redundant protected power in the event there is a hurricane or other event that causes widespread power outages. ●
Off-site sterile processing facility: This will move sterile processing of surgical instruments off the hospital campus to streamline operational efficiencies and make more space available on the main campus.
As TGH rolls out Phase 1 of its master facility plan, it is already well positioned as one of the most comprehensive academic medical centers in Florida. It provides services to more than 23 counties that are
home to millions of residents, and it ranks as one of the 20 largest freestanding hospitals in the country. Now it is poised to expand into a new generation of care and impact.
“We’ll have close to 1,200 beds when this phase of the master facility plan is complete,” Couris explained. “Adding capacity to care for more patients in the hospital gives us important flexibility. It allows us to be proactive, not reactive, and to change with the demands of the community, state, and country.”
Couris points to the hospital’s successful handling of the COVID-19 crisis during its height in 2020 as an apt example of how TGH dealt with a community demand—this one of crisis proportions—on the fly.
“ B e c a u s e o f o u r s i z e , b e c a u s e o f o u r t e a m , w e w e r e a b l e t o m o r p h a n d a d a p t a s t h e v i r u s m o r p h e d a n d a d a p t e d , ” h e s a i d . “ A n d o t h e r t h a n a m a n d a t e d s t o p o n e l e c t i v e s u r g e r i e s a c r o s s m a n y s t a t e s e a r l y o n , w e n e v e r s l o w e d d o w n o r s t o p p e d o u r c a r e f o r n o n - C O V I D p a t i e n t s . ”
TGH will be even more capable of dealing with the unforeseen—whether that be a natural disaster or the next pandemic—as it grows with the master facility plan.
“As a Level 1 trauma center, we are always in a state of readiness, but COVID brought that to a whole new level,” Cullen added. “It honestly taught us how fast we can move and, most significantly, how important every single team member in this institution is, from the person who cleans the floor to the trauma surgeon. With the master facility plan, we’re not just making a commitment to the area and state— we’re making a commitment to our team members that says, ‘This is how much we love Tampa General and the work we do.’ We’re willing to invest this much money, time, energy, and expertise into making it even better.” With population growth of 1.4 percent a year in Hillsborough County alone, TGH projects an increase in patient admissions to 2.3 percent by the end of the decade, underscoring the need for additional expansion and innovation. Phases 2 and 3 will be a continuation of efforts to modernize TGH’s facilities, allowing the hospital to keep growing and investing in such regions as Palm Beach, Fort Myers, and Naples.
“As we grow in Palm Beach, for instance, we are not interested in interrupting referral patterns or existing relationships with physicians and hospitals,” Couris added. “What we are interested in doing is providing care and access, doing rare and complex work. We want people to realize that. And we’re actually partnering with many local physicians because they understand and appreciate that.”
Dr. Nishit Patel, TGH’s chief medical informatics officer, views the master facility plan as
Inset: Rendering of a new freestanding emergency department planned for Kennedy Boulevard Below: Sterile processing services will be moved off site.
an opportunity to think differently about hospital designs and health care delivery.
“This is an incredibly unique opportunity for us to rethink the basic elements of clinical spaces and instead envision what is needed to truly support our physicians, nurses, and clinical team members to deliver world-class care to our patients,” he said. “In the ‘room of the future,’ we have created an environment that helps our clinicians more efficiently care for our patients and can even help save precious minutes through room automation during critical events like a code blue, which is called when a cardiac arrest occurs. When you combine this framework with the tremendous power of telehealth technology to connect patients to both their care teams and their families, we see a space that effortlessly supports both the current and future models of care delivery.”
Rachel Feinman, TGH’s vice president of innovation, sees modernization as a key element to the master facility plan. “In addition to just adding capacity and space, the ability to think innovatively is vital,” she said. “And part of the master facility plan means hardwiring the institution in new ways that will bring about new technological solutions.”
The two specially equipped “rooms of the future” in the newly built ICU are such an example. They are currently being tested with patients and accomplish several important tasks: increasing efficiency for physicians and nurses to provide information that leads to better patient care; allowing for virtual care, in which patients can connect wirelessly with family and loved ones, as well as physicians; and supporting emergency events that use technology in the rooms by automating code blue identification. (Turn the page to learn more about these innovative spaces.)
At the heart of everything contained in the master facility plan is a TGH credo: the right care, at the right time, in the right place.
“That says we are serious about our work, serious about our community, and serious about caring for people in the state of Florida,” Couris said. “I want people to know that we are the state of Florida’s hospital. We are one of the go-to places for patients when they are really sick, and we will provide them with world-class care.”
The new ICU on the sixth floor of the East Pavilion measures 27,500 square feet and features 34 state-of-the-art rooms, two of which are “rooms of the future” that include responsive tech that automatically reacts when code blues occur.
