Winter Garden Magazine October 2016 | Page 16

FLORIDA HOSPITAL + + + + + + + It’s been a busy first year of operation for Florida Hospital Winter Garden, which began seeing patients in February. Since then, the hospital has seen more than 12,000 patients in the emergency department alone, illustrating the need for medical services in this fast-growing area. But in addition to seeing such a large quantity of patients, the hospital has earned an important recognition for quality too. The American College of Radiology has accredited the hospital’s mammography program. The ACR accreditation is recognized as the gold standard in medical imaging. The Mammography Accreditation Program provides peer review and feedback on staff qualifications, equipment, quality control and assurance, image quality and dose. In addition, the hospital’s patient experience and nursing engagement results have been in the top 10 percent of facilities across the country. 16  |  WINTER GARDEN MAGAZINE  |  OCTOBER 2016 And things aren’t going to slow down for the new hospital anytime soon. Construction is set to begin in early 2017 on a medical office building that will be adjacent to the current facility. The building will allow Florida Hospital to grow outpatient services to meet community need, as well as to provide offices for existing and new physicians to the community to relocate and/or expand their services close to the hospital. Beyond the new office building, bigger plans are in the works as well: Florida Hospital recently filed what’s known as a certificate of need with the state of Florida to expand beyond the current three-story, 97,000-square-foot facility. While the current hospital includes a 24-hours-a-day emergency department, imaging center, outpatient laboratory, outpatient surgery, and a large multi-specialty clinic with physician offices, plans call for a much larger facility to provide a wider range of services for the community.