This spring, Oregon Health & Science University will begin a US$650 million expansion of its hospital, increasing its total beds by almost one-third. The 530,000 square feet of new space will be housed in a spectacular, U-shaped structure on OHSU’s Marquam Hill campus, between the Casey Eye Institute and Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. The new facility will accommodate 184 new inpatient beds, the majority of which will be adult surgical beds.
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In the end, the project will not only add adult beds, but it will also extend and modernize OHSU’s neonatal critical care and delivery services, therefore eradicating a long-standing issue impacting Oregon’s most vulnerable inhabitants. The new building will be built on the former location of the OHSU School of Dentistry, which was relocated to the Skourtes Tower in the Robertson Life Sciences Building on OHSU’s South Waterfront campus.
Oregon Health & Science University Hospital expansion urgent
The OHSU board of trustees allocated financing in 2019 to develop an OHSU Hospital expansion, however the project was halted owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. The preceding 20 months have further heightened the urgency of this project by highlighting the impact OHSU’s present capacity limits have on OHSU’s ability to offer the complicated health care Oregonians require. Despite ongoing efforts to maximize the use of inpatient beds through partnerships with other OHSU-affiliated hospitals and a real-time system to track and manage patient flow, OHSU Hospital currently operates at or near capacity for adults on a near-constant basis, as it did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The expansion of OHSU Hospital will allow us to care for the many Oregonians whose needs rely on the state’s sole academic health system.” Furthermore, the cutting-edge facility will improve the university’s ability to train the next generation of health care professionals to provide complex care and discover more breakthroughs for better health,” said John Hunter, M.D., FACS, executive vice president and chief executive officer of OHSU Health.
