Two new state-of-the-art hospitals made huge inroads in 2021 in their quest to provide top-notch health care close to home.

St. Luke’s Carbon Campus in Franklin Township opened last month while Lehigh Valley Hospital-Carbon is set to open in the spring of 2022 in Mahoning Township.

St. Luke’s Carbon Campus

St. Luke’s University Health Network just opened the doors to its $80 million Carbon campus, the biggest such project in Franklin Township’s history, on Nov. 20.

Several weeks later, the hospital was already at full capacity, and has seen a huge demand for emergency services, according to John Nespoli, president of St. Luke’s Carbon Campus.

Nespoli said the shell space will go from 17 to 29 beds in the ER, adding it was anticipated that was going to be a 2023 project, but instead, they will be moving forward with the concept by the spring of 2022.

Additionally, he said they also have approval for the third floor, and can add another 40 beds, and received approval to start working on the third floor and add 24 inpatient beds that will take them from 40 to 64 inpatient units by the end of 2022.

Nespoli said they already had approval to go build a medical office building attached to the medical center.

The three-story, 80-patient-room, 160,000-square-foot facility, is located near the intersection of Harrity and Fairyland roads.

The Carbon campus will be home to 500 employees during its Phase 1 opening.

Also, its Lehighton Campus, the former Gnaden Huetten Memorial Hospital on North 12th Street, will undergo a renovation and expansion of behavioral health services.

Essential patient services remaining at the Lehighton campus will be a medical office building, radiology, laboratory draws, infusion, wound care, pulmonary function testing, cardiac/pulmonary rehabilitation, behavioral health, acute care rehabilitation and inpatient rehabilitation.

St. Luke’s Monroe Campus

St. Luke’s University Health Network will add a 175,000-square-foot patient care tower to its Monroe Campus in response to rising demand for the network’s nationally recognized health care services.

The $85 million, four-story addition will double the size of the existing hospital.

“This expansion will meet the continuously increasing and projected demand for our medical services,” said Don Seiple, president of St. Luke’s Monroe Campus. “This growth reflects the confidence our Monroe County neighbors have placed in our providers, a trust that we hold sacred.”

To be built on the east side of the campus, the addition will house a general medical-surgical unit with 36 beds, additional operating and procedure space and expanded outpatient programs, as well as shell space for future development.

In keeping with St. Luke’s tradition, the addition will be built with American-made steel.

St. Luke’s Monroe Chief of Medicine, Douglas A. Degler, MD, called the tower project “a timely, well-planned and critical investment that will increase our population’s access to high-quality care that it needs and deserves.”

Groundbreaking for construction is slated for spring 2022, with opening of the new addition in early 2024.

The project will employ 250 construction workers, injecting a powerful economic stimulus into the local economy. It will also result in the creation of 80 new jobs - with more to come later as shell space is occupied.

Located just off Route 611, Stroudsburg, St. Luke’s Monroe Campus welcomed its first patients in 2016. This 180,000-square-foot hospital with four stories features private patient rooms including beds for critical care patients, a large and efficient emergency room, helipad, state-of-the-art operating rooms, a cardiac catheterization lab and the most modern diagnostic technology.

LVH-Carbon

Terry Purcell, president of LVH-Carbon, said the facility will eventually boast at least 40 doctors, hospitalists, ER doctors, primary care doctors, and a whole assortment of specialists.

“We’ll be busy right in the very beginning; right now every hospital is at capacity,” Purcell said. “The community needs more health care providers.”

From the outset, LVH-Carbon will have 18 private inpatient beds, though Purcell said they’ll likely have to expand quickly.

Purcell noted they have the capacity to expand, to 36 beds and does foresee that happening in the future.

The hospital’s emergency department will have 16 beds and be staffed by physicians who have worked at LVHN’s Cedar Crest campus.

When the hospital opens, Purcell anticipates a lot of LVHN employees from Carbon County will be seeking the opportunity to work in the facility. Currently, he said, LVHN has 871 Carbon County residents working at one of its other campuses.

Further, Purcell said there will be 150 new employees hired for the hospital, “which will be a boom from an economic standpoint.”

Purcell said the hospital remains on track to open by spring.

“I think our hospitals are going to open when our county and the region need it the most,” he said.

Purcell said it’s a challenging time to be in the health care field.

“I’d like to thank all the health care workers for all they’ve endured in 2021,” he said. “Health care is very demanding right now; our workers are working so hard under a lot of stress, and they do a great job every day.”

The new hospital, located cattycorner to the Walmart Superstore on Blakeslee Boulevard, will cover over 100,000 square feet and feature 18 private inpatient beds, a 12-bay emergency department, two operating rooms, two procedure rooms and four observation rooms with plans to expand in the future.