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ORANGE PARK — The Orange Park Medical Center broke ground on a new 60,000-square-foot facility set to open next year that continues the hospital’s commitment to providing better healthcare to the surrounding community.

OPMC has been a part of continuous growth in its 47 years in Clay County. What began as a community hospital has grown into a megacomplex that can handle virtually anything and everything when it comes to medical procedure and care. The hospital is set to grow with a new medical office building.

“We’re here today because [HCA Healthcare] and Orange Park Medical Center are once again investing in our community,” CEO Lisa Valentine said. “It’s about providing more resources to our community and healthcare providers here in Clay County and our surrounding areas. We’re proud to expand our facilities, but we’ve also been expanding our clinical services. This is another step in that.”

The new building will feature physician offices for general surgery, women’s care, imaging services, neurology care, ear and nose and throat care and primary care. OPMC’s anesthesiology medical director and Board of Trustees Director, Deevid Miller, said the new building will make providing the care even easier.

Miller has been with OPMC for more 30 years and he said the growth he’s seen OPMC incur over the years is astounding. He remembers when it was just a small community hospital when if someone needed a complex medical procedure such as open-heart surgery, they would be transferred to a different hospital.

That’s not the case anymore as the hospital can handle all kinds of complex medical procedures like open heart surgery, brain surgery and much more. He said the hospital is once again a stroke center, “which means if someone has a stroke, this is the place to be.”

“Not only will this new option keep patients close to home but it will keep them close to any other care they need, such as MRIs or X-rays or a trip to the emergency room,” OPMC general surgeon Scott Lind said. Miller spoke of parent company HCA’s commitment to OPMC’s growth. He said it’s never been a better time to work for the medical center or be a patient there. When discussing how important this new building which is set to open in early 2022 will be, Valentine mentioned how critical it was to have the support of business leaders and government leaders. She said without them, the building and the celebratory groundbreaking ceremony wouldn’t have been possible. Nearly three dozen from the county’s business and government community attended the event.

Valentine also teased an announcement OPMC is set to make next month about another new building at the medical complex.

“We know that building and equipment are terribly important to providing excellent healthcare, but it really is about the people,” Valentine said. “It is about our clinicians, our leaders, our physicians…all of you who actually do the work day in and day out, supporting our teams at the bedside, that really make the care that we offer here so exceptional, and the compassion and the kindness in which you do that is what’s really most important.

“All of these things have resulted in us achieving a spot in the top 250 hospitals in the U.S. by health grades. We’ve once again been recertified as a comprehensive stroke center and we’ve earned all the American Heart Association guidelines again so credit to...everyone working in this community to make that happen.”

Valentine asked the audience to think about the 47 years the OPMC has served the community as the business and government leaders present at the ceremony turned over dirt with honorary shovels.

“It wouldn’t have been possible without your support, your predecessors’ support, and we really celebrate what’s to come and there are certainly a lot of wonderful things to come,” she said.

Read more about the booming Clay healthcare and life sciences industry here.