Franklin Square breaks ground on new surgical pavilion

MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center broke ground Monday on a $70 million surgical pavilion that will house 14 state-of-the-art operating rooms. They will replace older, undersized rooms that are now spread over two areas in the adjacent hospital.

The Rosedale facility won approval from state regulators last year for the new 80,000-square-foot, two-story building that connects directly to the existing hospital. The hospital joins others in the region in modernizing older buildings and equipment and seeking to offer patients and their families better and safer experiences.

The new building, expected to open in the fall of 2020, will rise on the former site of the Baltimore County Eastern Family Resource Center, which was moved nearby on the hospital campus.

Samuel E. Moskowitz, hospital president and senior vice president of MedStar Health, said in a statement that the new building had “energized” the hospital as it approaches its 50th anniversary.

“We’ve come a long way since we opened in 1969, and we’re so proud of the strides we’ve made toward providing quality care and a better, safer patient experience,” he said. “These new operating rooms underscore our commitment to patients. Not only does the expanded space allow for the latest technologies, the new layout and design changes will make moving between the operating rooms, the PACU [post-anesthesia care unit] and the patient’s hospital room, convenient and easy to find for family members.”

The building will offer 13 operating rooms and another one that can be used for general surgery or catheterization, a diagnostic and treatment procedure in which imaging is used to guide long, thin tubes through arteries to the heart. There will also be 28 private prep and recovery rooms for patients, 24 post-anesthesia bays, space for sterile storage and support staff, and a public waiting area for families.

The community hospital also supports a surgical residency program which trains new doctors. The new center will offer surgeries, including those using minimally invasive procedures and robotic or Cyberknife systems. The hospital also performs surgeries and services related to cancer, diagnostic imaging and radiology, obstetrics and neonatology, orthopedics and joint replacement.

The hospital’s existing operating rooms will remain in use during construction.

The hospital also will continue to perform outpatient pediatric surgeries, as well as seeing children in the emergency room and having pediatricians in the hospital, after the inpatient pediatric unit closed earlier this year.

“We make investments as a system and the entirety of MedStar believes that what MedStar Franklin Square is doing deserved a level of investment to support eastern Baltimore County, Harford County and all the people in these communities,” MedStar Health President and CEO Kenneth A. Samet said at the groundbreaking. “What all of us are a part of is creating a legacy that decades from now, we’ll all be proud of.”