Hospital seeks to grow at UNC

Plan would add 321-bed tower

CHAPEL HILL -- UNC Hospitals wants to build a 321-bed tower on its old helipad site in front of N.C. Memorial Hospital.

The project would increase the total number of patient beds to 1,009 by 2014.

"We are chronically jammed full," said Bill Roper, chief executive officer of UNC Health Care and dean of the medical school.

Growth in the aging population and across the region is fueling demand, he said.

As of April, UNC Hospitals was running 89.2 percent full this fiscal year. But spokeswoman Karen McCall said that figure doesn't give the full picture.

"A bed is not a bed," she said.

Patients can't just be put wherever there's space. People of different sexes can't share a semiprivate room. Some specialized units may be 95 percent full or higher, meaning the patients who need those beds have to wait.

In some cases, the hospital has had to send patients to other hospitals or refuse to admit patients from other facilities.

Ideally, the hospital would like to run 75 percent to 80 percent full, McCall said.

UNC Hospitals has 727 beds now. It soon will be moving workers out of offices and converting spaces into patient rooms to reach 799 beds by 2010, Roper said. That project has been approved.

The new tower would add 321 beds, but because some older semiprivate rooms would be converted to singles, the total number of beds would be 1,009.

The tower also would have 38 operating and procedure rooms.

They would replace rooms -- some dating to the 1950s -- built before today's monitoring equipment, extensive laparoscopic surgery, robotic surgery and other advances, according to hospital officials.

UNC Health Care is requesting $325.5 million from the state over several years for the $732 million project.

The hospital would pay the rest by borrowing and using reserves.

The tower is part of UNC System President Erskine Bowles' budget request to the legislature. But Roper doesn't know whether lawmakers will fund the project this year.

"They are saying money is tight; we are presenting this to them as a long-term need," he said.

It took three years to win approval for the new cancer hospital scheduled to open next year, he said.