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Hospital: Let us make room for baby

St. Joseph's Women's Hospital wants to enlarge its neonatal ICU as part of a 54,000-square-foot expansion.

By ALEXANDRA ZAYAS
Published August 4, 2006

TAMPA - Tiny babies and women needing hospital treatment stand to benefit from a proposed 54,000-square-foot expansion to St. Joseph's Women's Hospital.

The push to expand the section of the hospital facing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard comes from a need to renovate the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, said hospital spokeswoman Lisa Patterson. The unit treats sick babies with complicated care needs - some weighing as little as 1 pound.

The unit can treat 42 babies, but demand regularly exceeds capacity, she said. That means babies sleep in clusters and families don't get a lot of space or time to sit with their sick newborns.

Beach Park resident Robyn Dunn recalled the 11 weeks she spent watching over her premature twins, Anna and Brady, in the unit. She spoke in support of the expansion at a City Council hearing July 27.

"It's very noisy, crowded and somewhat chaotic," Dunn, 43, said after the meeting. "It's open air, and you can see all the babies. There's lots of equipment and wires and noises, and you always feel like you're in the way."

Anna and Brady were born at 28 weeks old, each weighing just more than 2 pounds. Dunn commends the nurses and doctors who cared for them, but she wishes she had had more privacy.

"We were learning how to care for our babies, breast-feed them - learning how to do lots of things that are very private and personal," Dunn said. "Some days you have good days, and some days you have bad days. And you want to cry, but you're in front of everybody."

The renovation plans would increase the unit's capacity to 64 babies. Individual rooms on the second floor would replace the clusters.

The third-floor plans include 52 private rooms for women seeking treatment at the hospital. The Breast Center would be expanded on the first floor, Patterson said.

The hospital plans to demolish a two-story building and replace it with a three-story building.

Charlie Miranda, a former City Council member who lives two blocks away from St. Joseph's, opposes the expansion.

"Things have gotten a little out of hand as far as St. Joseph's appetite," Miranda said. "The more the appetite for rooms, the more patients are serviced and the more homes in the neighborhood fall prey to becoming doctors' offices."

Miranda said homes are already being replaced by offices, and that his residential neighborhood is deteriorating.

But "the general public won't understand that," Miranda said. "Who's going to say no to a natal care center?"

The most noticeable addition to the complex would be a bridge over Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard connecting the women's hospital with the main hospital. Now, the hospitals must transfer patients between buildings via ambulance.

Dunn, whose daughter was taken to the main hospital for a colonoscopy, said a bridge would reduce the trauma.

"She had to be loaded into this big incubator that was loaded into an ambulance. She had to be taken over like that, and I had to cross Martin Luther King," Dunn said. "It was kind of stressful seeing this tiny little thing go in an ambulance."

The expansion issue is scheduled to return to the City Council for a second and final reading on Aug. 17.

If approved, Patterson said hospital officials will start working on a timeline for the project. She did not have a cost estimate for construction but said the hospital would launch a major fundraising campaign.

Alexandra Zayas can be reached at (813) 226-3354 or azayas@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 3, 2006, 11:01:36]