A rendering of the new Jackson Avenue “front door” to the medical center.
The $130 million expansion project at St. Bernards Medical Center in Jonesboro, the largest project in the hospital’s history, began taking shape in 2013.
The hospital hired the architectural firm HKS Inc. of Dallas, which also specializes in master planning for hospitals, to identify the areas of growth for the medical center, said Kevin Hodges, vice president of affiliated and senior services at St. Bernards.
HKS projected the top areas in demand would be cancer, heart care and surgical services, Hodges said.
“So with that identification of growth, we quickly saw that we were going to need to add a facility, square footage,” he said.
The hospital decided on a four-phase construction project plan that included building a 245,000-SF, five-story surgical and intensive care tower and renovating the emergency department. It announced the plans in mid-December.
The first phase of the project will be a cancer center that brings all components of the hospital’s cancer service line into a single facility on its main campus. The work is expected to be completed in October. All the projects are expected to be completed by 2019. Nabholz Construction of Conway is the contractor for the project.
Hodges said the hospital could fund the construction project out of its operations, but it is keeping its options open for ways to pay for the project.
Each phase of the project is dependent on the previous phase being completed.
“We very carefully have laid out this plan so we can maintain our operations at par level that we have now,” he said. “That’s very important to us.”
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