Within the span of 24 hours, several community members got to tour the new Florida Hospital Apopka (FHA) building and speak with its staff about the facility’s upgrades over the current FHA campus on North Park Avenue counterpart.
On Tuesday, November 14, the hospital welcomed community members to a VIP celebration event with guest speakers consisting of top hospital personnel and Apopka Mayor Joe Kilsheimer.
The next day, on Wednesday, November 15, the media was invited to a ribbon cutting and a tour of the $203-million, seven-story, 120-bed facility, located on Ocoee-Apopka Road near the intersection of State Road 429 and SR 414.
The tentative date of patient transfer from the Park Avenue facility to the new one is December 5.
“This place is beautiful, but it’s so much more than a building,” said Terry Shaw, president/CEO of Adventist Health System, at the November 14 VIP celebration program. “It represents the change in the direction from a service’s standpoint that the greater Apopka community will have. It represents a hub of services we’ll be working to put into this greater metropolitan area in this end of the world, so that we can continue to work and to extend hope and healing to everyone in this marketplace.”
The hospital has four operating rooms, two catheterization labs for interventional radiology procedures, an expanded women’s center, an outpatient rehabilitation program, and an intensive care unit (ICU) with 20 beds and 24-hour critical care coverage.
Florida Hospital administrator Tim Cook announced that the hospital staff has been partnering with the Apopka food pantry Loaves & Fishes in collecting food items. That will be done at the Sunday, November 26, grand opening/community open house.
The grand opening, scheduled for 1-4 p.m. at 2100 Ocoee-Apopka Road, Apopka, will offer a tour of the hospital, face painting, balloon animals, touch-a-truck with Florida Hospital ambulances, and a pumpkin patch. A health expo will give out the latest health information and offer a variety of free health screenings.
The hospital will also provide about 350 turkeys for the families that Loaves & Fishes will serve over the holiday season, Cook announced.
Through the November 26 food collection, the hospital hopes to address the issue of food desert and nutrition. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines food deserts as “areas that lack access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up the full range of a healthy diet.”
An extended version of this story appears on page 1A of the Friday, November 17, issue of The Apopka Chief.
