St. Joseph’s Hospital Patient Tower and Central Energy Plant

Project Overview

BayCare St. Joseph’s Hospital expanded its Tampa main campus with a new six-story, 90-bed patient tower to meet growing demand for care. BSA provided engineering services and built on our earlier work designing the hospital’s Central Energy Plant (CEP).

Original Central Energy Plant Design

BSA originally designed a 12-megawatt, 15kV power generation plant and campus-wide distribution system that provides robust backup power and operational resiliency.

• Two natural gas and four diesel generators, with stored fuel for 96 hours of runtime
• Separate medium-voltage loops for essential and normal power systems
• Major electrical upgrades across the campus, including switchgear and feeder replacements
• 48 automatic transfer switches for reliable power transfer
• A campus-wide SCADA monitoring and control system
• Code-compliant electrical distribution with segregated normal power, critical branch, equipment branch, and life-safety branch circuits

This backbone infrastructure ensures that patient care at St. Joseph’s Hospital continues uninterrupted during utility outages or emergencies.

New Main Campus Patient Tower

The new patient tower includes two lobbies with a drive-up front entrance, waiting rooms, on-call rooms, and conference/classroom spaces. There are three patient care floors, each with 30 patient rooms per floor. The second and third floors house the mechanical support rooms. A new pedestrian bridge across Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard links the tower to St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital and connects into the existing main tower at multiple levels.

For the patient tower, BSA expanded the CEP’s capabilities to support added demand. The upgrades included a new chiller, cooling tower, boiler, and redundant fire pump, along with stairwell pressurization and smoke evacuation systems for life safety.

Impact

By first establishing a resilient Central Energy Plant and then expanding it for the patient tower, BSA delivered reliable engineering systems that strengthen care delivery, support staff, and ensure the long-term operational stability of St. Joseph’s Hospital’s Tampa campus. The project was expedited in 2020 to rapidly increase capacity for COVID-19 patients.

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