Tampa General to build behavioral health hospital at Kennedy campus
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Feb 16, 2022

Tampa General Hospital plans to add a behavioral health facility to its growing medical campus on Kennedy Boulevard.

TGH on Wednesday said it will build the four-story, 96-bed TGH Behavioral Health Hospital adjacent to its new rehabilitation hospital. The campus occupies 9 acres bounded by Kennedy Boulevard to the south, North B Street to the north, North Oregon Avenue to the west and North Willow Avenue to the east.

A TGH spokeswoman declined comment on the development costs and the project's general contractor. Construction is to begin in late 2022 or early 2023 and wrap up in 2024. The new hospital will be 83,000 square feet and have the capacity to expand to 120 beds.

“Working side-by-side with USF Health, the new TGH Behavioral Health Hospital will provide critical academically driven behavioral health care, support the next generation of behavioral health physicians and fortify Tampa’s growing medical district, while moving TGH one step closer to being the country’s safest and most innovative academic medical center," Tampa General CEO John Couris said in a statement.

TGH Behavioral Health will offer inpatient and outpatient services led by psychiatrists from USF Health. Tampa General's main hospital is the teaching hospitality for students, residents and fellows at the University of South Florida's Morsani College of Medicine. USF and TGH formalized their relationship as an academic medical center in early 2020.

TGH said the facility will help attract medical residents and psychiatrists to the Tampa Bay area, where there is a shortage of behavioral health practitioners. Resident physicians in the psychiatry field will receive on-the-job training at the new hospital.

“We are proud to provide the highest level of academic psychiatric care in the region and look forward to offering this same standard of critical care in the new behavioral health hospital as part of our continued alignment with TGH,” Dr. Charles Lockwood, senior vice president for USF Health and dean of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, said in a statement. “Together, we are working to make Tampa Bay a destination for the finest health care in Florida and the Southeastern United States."

A freestanding emergency department is also planned for that property. The new facility will also be linked to TGH's Neurosciences Institute and will also serve as a central receiving facility, or the first point of care and evaluation for patients in a behavioral health crisis.

"This specialized hospital will also ease the burden on area emergency rooms," said Dr. Glenn Currier, chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, "which take in the bulk of psychiatric emergencies but have few options for the inpatient care that is so critical for successful management of many behavioral and mental health conditions.”