Baptist moves ahead with Oxford hospital

Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. will add the 78,000-square-foot Oxford Medical Office Building to the new Baptist Memorial Hospital-North Mississippi facility that is under construction. Work is expected to begin this spring.

The five-story hospital will have 602,831 square feet, including 217 beds. The patient rooms will be 50 percent larger and more private than the current facility. The emergency department will be expanded to more than 25,000 square feet, with 35 rooms.
Site work for the new hospital began in January 2015. Concrete for the fourth of five total floors recently was poured, with an anticipated completion of that stage in March or April. The facility should be complete by August with a four-month move-in period to follow, with the anticipation that the first patients will be seen in the facility by the first of December.

Baptist North Mississippi has worked with officials since 2009 to build a replacement hospital for Oxford, Lafayette County and the surrounding area.

The facility is regional with a focus on an 11-county area around Oxford.

While the hospital is built to handle the latest technology, it is designed to grow with the community.

“We’ve designed a building that’s flexible and able to change as health care technology changes,” said Bill Henning, Administrator of Baptist North Mississippi. “We’re able to add on to the building as growth warrants. A lot of people, when they think of a new hospital, they think of bricks and mortar, but what we’ve tried to do is take advantage of new digital hardware, IT system capabilities and the ability to take into account new technology down the road that we don’t know about today.”
While the hospital will have the same number of beds as the current facility, Henning said the focus in health care is on outpatient care. The new facility will reflect that change.

“Ninety percent of patients don’t spend a night here,” he said. “We needed a facility for those patients who are in and out on the same day.”