NSU is one step closer to getting a hospital on campus.
The Agency for Healthcare Administration gave preliminary approval to Hospital Corporation of America East Florida’s Certificate of Need to build a hospital on NSU’s campus.
President George Hanbury said when AHCA announces this decision on its website this week, local hospitals will have 21 days to contest the decision.
“The Certificate of Need has been preliminary approved subject to those 21 days,” Hanbury said. “If there’s no objection within those 21 days, the approval of HCA’s Certificate of Need is granted without any further action. If there is an appeal, then an administrative law judge will make a final ruling.”
The plan would relocate Plantation General Hospital to NSU. The hospital is licensed for 265 beds, which HCA will relocate. 200 beds will be relocated to the campus hospital, but the corporation will keep an emergency facility on Route 441 to serve the immediate needs of Plantation General’s community. In addition, HCA has agreed that anyone who goes to that emergency facility and needs to be admitted to a hospital will be transported to the campus hospital for free.
“Even though they’re talking about building 200 beds, which is 65 less than the beds they have now at Plantation General, it will be three times bigger because it will eventually become not just a community hospital but a teaching-research hospital,” Hanbury said.
Hanbury said that while the mayor of Plantation has opposed the move, believing HCA to be “greedy” for moving the hospital from a lower-income area, 30 percent of the NSU clinic medical patients currently come from the ZIP codes immediately surrounding Plantation General. The hospital is moving 4.6 miles, which Hanbury said is only one ZIP code to the southwest.
“We will have a new state-of-the-art hospital integrated into our brand new Center for Collaborative Research for potential clinical trials and all the research we’ve been talking about,” Hanbury said.
Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of the College of Undergraduate Studies Brad Williams said that the news is “a game changer” for the university.
“It will impact every element of the university,” Williams said. “It will impact the entire student body as well as the university because of the reputation it will allow us to continue to grow .”
Williams noted that teaching hospitals on private university campuses include hospitals at schools such as Vanderbilt University and Tulane University.
“It puts us into an arena that is significant and it’s very good for all of us, so I’m thrilled,” Williams said.
Though other hospitals can still contest the decision, Williams said the approval was a “big hurdle” that NSU had tried to overcome a few times.
Vice President for Facilities Management Pete Witschen said the hospital has been planned for several years. NSU has already identified the lower third of the University Park Plaza, a 9-acre piece of land, as the construction site. The emergency facility currently in construction in UPP will be connected to the hospital.
Construction will require moving several offices, including the NSU Bookstore and Henderson Student Counseling Services.
“Even though this is just preliminary and there are still approval processes, we will start to map out what we will do to ensure that the necessary classes and the spaces in UPP get moved someplace else on campus,” Witschen said.
HCA will own the land the hospital is built on and will begin demolition and site work about 36 months after final approval of the Certificate of Need.
“To have a facility like this one, combined with the Center for Collaborative Research, will be transformational for the campus,” Witschen said.
Undergraduate Student Government Association President Kelly Scott, senior athletic training major, said many students wrote letters of support for the hospital. She was thrilled when she heard the news.
“I was so excited because it’s such a huge deal for NSU and it’s really going to put us on the map because this is not something that every university has,” Scott said.
Scott hopes the hospital helps NSU’s retention, attendance and admission rates as future students will benefit from it.
