North Florida Regional to receive new upgrades

North Florida Regional Medical Center will start 110 million dollars' worth of upgrades next month.

You can already see a little bit of construction starting but the main renovations will begin in early October. The renovations start with adding one thing everybody in Gainesville can breathe a sigh of relief about, more parking.

There are four main upgrades coming soon, a new parking garage with 900 more spaces and a 70 million dollar expansion to the facilities South tower.

CEO of North Florida Regional Medical Center Eric Lawson explained, " the primary part of the construction project really is expansion into a neonatal intensive care unit, an adult intensive care unit and then a specialized orthopedic unit."

Krista Hatley is the Vice-president of Women's and Children's Services, she says more space means the ability to deliver more babies. "With this expansion last year we had 3200 deliveries here in the Gainesville community certainly with this expansion we'll be able to provide more space for them so we'd love to get to 4000 deliveries if we could that would be amazing."

Neo-natal care focuses on newborns and their families and having more space to work with will help medical professionals give them the best care possible especially for premature and sick newborns.

Hatley said "More space definitely provides us the opportunity to care for more patients so we don't have the problem of overflowing and having to go into spaces which aren't necessarily optimal for patient care. So if we have too many NICU patients then we have to go to a room that is pretty small and cramped and not ideal for parents coming to visit their babies. So it will be fantastic to provide actual rooms and spaces for them."

All the expansions are projected to be completed by late 2020 or early 2021, Lawson says the added space also means more opportunities for job seekers.

"Not only are we adding more intensive services and growing our capabilities for the community, we're also adding jobs. I think in today's environment that's a really important thing to talk about. We project over the next 5 years that we'll add over 100 jobs."

The emergency room is also expanding and should be completed in the next week. Lawson tells TV20 they are adding more patient areas or bays so wait times will be reduced and the roughly 70-thousand people who come through the emergency room every year can be treated more efficiently.