Inside Moffitt Cancer Center’s new McKinley hospital

Moffitt Cancer Center is opening its second inpatient hospital on July 31, a key milestone amid the health network’s ambitious expansion plan.

Moffitt already has four campuses. Its original University of South Florida location, the organization’s home base since it launched in 1986, includes an outpatient clinic, research facilities and a four-story inpatient hospital. The 50-acre McKinley campus has had an outpatient clinic since 2015, and clinics in Wesley Chapel and International Plaza round out Moffitt’s current holdings.

The new inpatient hospital will add to the growth of its McKinley Drive campus.

The 10-story, 128-bed McKinley hospital comes as Moffitt is outgrowing its 202-bed USF hospital. The new hospital, meant for patients staying an average of three to seven days, features 19 operating rooms, each nearly double the size of the 14 operating rooms at the USF hospital.

“Intention” is a guiding term at the new hospital, which was designed in close consultation with Moffitt’s patient and family advisory program, a council of current and past patients, family members and caregivers.

Some key features:

• A discharge room at the exit gives outgoing patients privacy post-surgery. “It’s about protecting their experience,” spokesperson Amanda Sangster said.

• There’s a spiritual retreat center complete with a foot-washing station. Chandeliers, donated artwork and sleek white floors and counters give the lobby the ambience of a luxury hotel.

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• Patient rooms are also bigger compared to the USF hospital, and include digital white boards that show patients health updates in real time. Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa allows patients to control some settings in their room without help from a nurse. Notes to nurses, such as warnings that patients are at risk of falling, are also digitized.

• Preparation and recovery rooms on the surgical floor include separate walls and sliding doors, not just curtains.

• Visitors have access to laundry facilities and visitor bathrooms, an advent for out-of-state and international travelers.

Along with enhancements to the patient experience, neurosurgeons will operate with the help of new cutting-edge technology: intraoperative magnetic resonance imaging, or MRIs, which creates images of the brain during surgery, allowing surgeons to track subtle shifts in real time.

This hospital will handle most surgeries involving solid tumors, the most common basis for inpatient surgery, Sangster said. Meanwhile, the USF campus will shift focus toward blood-related cancer treatments like transfusions.

Unlike many pandemic-era projects, the McKinley hospital’s opening date was never pushed back. Construction began in March 2020 and finishing touches are still wrapping up this week. Once the hospital opens, four floors will be open to patients, while two floors are “shelf floors” in anticipation of surgical demand increasing, said Christine Alvero, vice president of hospital operations at McKinley.

“We built this hospital to solve our problems of today and our problems of tomorrow,” Sangster said.

The lead-up to opening day also includes training sessions for doctors and nurses. Nearly 1,000 employees will staff the hospital, including about 800 new hires. Many of those hires will come from a program that links USF nursing graduates to Moffitt, a critical pipeline as a national nursing shortage persists, Alvero said.

“A year ago we were very panicked about how we’re going to staff the nurses we need to staff,” Alvero said.

An outside firm has helped Moffitt add experienced nurses to its McKinley cohort. The system is leaning on “a handful” of temporary agency staffers as new nurses get trained for their roles, Alvero said.

Moffitt has other expansion plans in the works: another outpatient clinic will open in Hillsborough County’s South Shore next year. And a 750-acre campus in Pasco County will launch in 2025 with state-of-the-art therapies.

Cancer care is broadly on the rise in Tampa Bay. Tampa General Hospital announced it has completed phase two of its cancer institute, located inside the organization’s Brandon Healthplex in south Hillsborough County.