Last week, Sarasota Memorial Hospital opened the doors of its new Venice location to the media to get an inside look. While construction of the state-of-the-art campus is complete, hospital staff will open its doors to patients later this month.

The campus is located at the intersection of Laurel Road East and Pinebrook Road, and offers an array of services, from emergency to intensive care, plus specialized surgery and cardiac, stroke, orthopedic and obstetrics care.

The five-story, 365,000-square-foot facility includes a 28-bed emergency care center with a stroke hub, two resuscitation rooms, eight surgical suites, a 22-bed intensive care unit (with ventilators that can convert critical care pods into pandemic units, if needed), an interventional radiology suite, cardiac catheterization labs and a variety of diagnostic and imaging services.

The hospital will initially open with 110 private patient suites and 10 birthing suites for expecting mothers. Services will ramp up over the next several weeks, starting primarily with patients with emergency conditions.

After that, the hospital will begin treating the full volume of patients for non-emergency services and procedures, as hospital officials work to complete the enrollment and authorization of insurance partners and the federal government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

More than 800 employees were hired for the new location. That includes a medical staff of more than 600 physicians and 200 advanced practice providers.

Another appeal of the campus is its ability to expand in a crisis. Work is already underway on a third patient care unit that will add 68 private suites. The campus is also designed in a way that will enable to hospital to double the size of its emergency care center and surgical suites up to 400 patient rooms, without disrupting hospital operations.

For more information on the Venice location's operations, click here.