TAMPA – BayCare has acquired a 36-acre office parcel in the Tampa Bay Park, which includes three buildings and two parking garages adjacent to St. Joseph’s, St. Joseph’s Children’s and St. Joseph’s Women’s hospitals.
BayCare announced Feb. 4 that it had acquired a 36-acre office parcel just west of its St. Joseph’s hospitals’ campus in Tampa to provide room for strategic growth.
The partial acquisition of the Tampa Bay Park includes three buildings and two parking garages and is adjacent to St. Joseph’s, St. Joseph’s Children’s and St. Joseph’s Women’s hospitals.
The acreage increases by more than 75% the health system’s property holdings in the West Tampa neighborhood where St. Joseph’s Hospital has operated for nearly a century. .
“As West Central Florida grows, so must BayCare to continue our mission to improve our communities’ health,” said Stephanie Conners, BayCare president and CEO. “The opportunity to buy such a large piece of property contiguous to one of our largest medical campuses provides us the opportunity to expand important specialty services for our patients and communities. This expanded campus will serve the entire region as a medical destination for specialty care.”
In the short term, BayCare is working individually with tenants of the facilities to support lease agreements. Relocating or adding BayCare offices and clinics to the property will happen over time.
The partial acquisition of Tampa Bay Park expands the campus into a regional destination for specialty care.
Eventually, the health system envisions directly linking the property via a new, vehicular bridge to its hospitals’ campus and using the facilities to complement the system’s needs but also those of St. Joseph’s hospitals – three centrally located facilities that are poised to expand to meet the region’s needs.
BayCare has announced it will build a new facility for St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital by 2030, and St. Joseph’s Hospital and its trauma center remain an essential resource for acute and specialty care for the region.
BayCare also has announced it will expand its graduate medical education programs to 650 residents by 2029 to help ensure West Central Florida and BayCare continue to attract the best and brightest physicians. Residencies occur after medical school and provide new physicians with supervised, hands-on training in the specialty or sub-specialty of their choice. By the middle of this year, BayCare is anticipating having up to 283 residents across 18 programs serving in its primary footprint of Hillsborough, Pasco, Pinellas and Polk counties.
“We are excited for the opportunity this provides BayCare, but also our communities,” said Kimberly Guy, chief operating officer for BayCare. “To have this many centrally located medical resources together in a single campus will deepen our region’s access to BayCare’s high-quality, compassionate care. It will also create an environment that attracts the brightest medical professionals to care for our patients.”
