St. Joseph's breaks new ground

TAMPA — St. Joseph's newest hospital will be a state-of-the-art facility with 352,000 square feet in Riverview and will offer a full range of services from emergency care to surgery and women's health care, according to hospital officials.

Located south of Tampa on a 72-acre campus, the long-awaited hospital will serve southern Hillsborough County, and is expected to open in 2015. In addition to the four-story hospital, the campus will include a medical office building with 40,000 square feet that offers imaging and laboratory services as well as primary care, officials say in a statement on the hospital's website. The office building is scheduled to open earlier than the hospital, in 2013.

St. Joseph's Hospital-South is part of BayCare Health System, based in Clearwater. It took years of persistence to get the new project under way, hospital President and CEO Isaac Mallah says in the announcement. His staff worked for more than seven years to obtain the needed approvals to begin building the hospital, a project originally conceived in the 1980s, notes Mallah.