Tampa General Hospital to break ground on 13-story expansion in 2024
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Dec 8, 2023

Tampa General Hospital will break ground on a significant expansion to its Davis Islands campus in 2024.

The hospital on Thursday received unanimous approval from Tampa City Council, which voted on a rezoning request for several parcels at and around 25 and 35 Columbia Drive and 1 Tampa General Circle. That rezoning approval makes way for a new pavilion — 13 stories home to the hospital’s surgical, neuroscience and transplant services.

The pavilion will be 565,000 square feet and add 144 patient beds, 32 operating suites and additional capacity for the TGH intensive care unit. The building will also have space for education and training, emergency response and sterile processing. Two floors will be reserved for future growth.

The hospital said it intends to preserve public space around the new building, allowing visitors and residents to walk the perimeter of the waterfront campus.

TGH considers this expansion the “flagship” of its previously announced $550 million master plan.

“The new building will not just transform Tampa General’s campus, it will be pivotal in our efforts to transform the health care landscape,” John Couris, president and CEO of TGH, said in a statement. “The TGH Surgical, Neuroscience and Transplant Pavilion will be an intersection of technology and human ingenuity, where patients can access best-in-class providers, modern equipment and state-of-the-art facilities.”

The pavilion will be another bolster to the medical and research district that TGH is building and defining in and around downtown Tampa. The district is bookended by the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine in Water Street Tampa and the hospital’s new Kennedy Boulevard campus, which is home to a freestanding emergency room, behavioral health hospital and a rehabilitation hospital.

That district, Couris has said, is key to solidifying Tampa’s reputation as an academic medical hub, like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore or MD Anderson’s Texas Medical Center in Houston. To build that brand for the city, Couris has entered a partnership with the Tampa Bay Economic Development Council to promote the district. In 2020, TGH and USF formalized their relationship to create an academic medical center.

“The new TGH Surgical, Neuroscience and Transplant Pavilion will be more than a building — it will provide a seamless coordination of care, education and research,” Dr. Charles J. Lockwood, executive vice president of USF Health and dean of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, said in a statement. “This environment will enhance the abilities of our physicians to provide patients with the highest quality care while also educating the next generation of health providers and pursuing research discoveries to both benefit our patients and improve health care.”