Officials celebrated a milestone in the construction of Bayhealth’s new Sussex County hospital, located just off Route 1 in Milford, Tuesday afternoon.
They held a “topping out” ceremony, raising a 200 lb ceremonial beam to the top of the 5.6 million lb steel building frame to symbolize the progress made on the structural phase of the project.
Bayhealth President and CEO Terry Murphy said the new 440,000-square-foot hospital will serve a largely unfulfilled need in Sussex County healthcare.
“We knew that it was a fast growing population, an aging population. And we knew to grow to provide services for the next 50-100 years, we wanted to invest in a new site that would allow us to expand for that period of time,” Murphy said.
The care the new hospital will provide will be “unmatched” in Sussex County, Milford Mayor Bryan Shupe said.
“Currently, for a lot of speciality care we have whether it be seniors or pediatrics going upstate or out of state, now they’ll be able to receive care right here in their backyard,” Shupe said.
The new location off Route 1 in Milford will house a six-story hospital with an expanded emergency department and private patient rooms.
Bayhealth’s Milford Memorial Hospital on Clarke Ave. is being sold to Nationwide Healthcare. Nationwide plans to turn it into a multi-use wellness pavilion for those who still need care after being in the hospital.
“Once somebody has left the hospital and they go back home and they still care, they still need to be taken care of, we’ll be there for them,” said Meir Gelley, the CEO of Nationwide Healthcare.
The hospital is being built on almost 170 acres of vacant land.
Bayhealth plans to open their new campus in 2019. That’s when Nationwide will open their facility as well.
