Guests crowd Baptist for peek at new Weaver tower

Guests crowd Baptist for peek at new Weaver tower
The new J. Wayne and Delores Barr Weaver Tower at Baptist. Photo by Michael LeGrand.

Michael Aubin, left listens to a demonstration of the new intra-operative imaging surgical suite at the hospital.

The hallways at Baptist Medial Center on Jacksonville’s Southbank were buzzing last month during the first official tours of the hospital’s newest building, the J. Wayne and Delores Barr Weaver Tower.
It was all hands on deck as hospital administrators, staff and medical leaders provided tours for the media, hospital staff and community members. San Marco residents Michael Mayo, president of Baptist Medical Center, and Wolfson Children’s Hospital President Michael Aubin led tours and answered questions about the 339,404-square-foot, 11-story building.
Employees began moving into the new tower late last month and patients are expected to begin receiving care at the building on Dec. 8. The first surgeries in the new tower are scheduled for Dec. 10.
The new tower has many features that are firsts for the area medical community, including intra-operative imaging capabilities for both children and adults. The new tower has 167 beds in private patients room, each with 300 square feet of space to accommodate family-centered care.
The building was designed by Stanley Beaman & Sears and Batson-Cook was the construction manager. Tilden Lobnitz Cooper provided engineering services.
On the children’s floors, the floors and rooms are decorated in a biosphere theme that showcases photographs and art of the river, ocean, grassland, forest, mountains and sky. A special nod is given to the hospital’s San Marco surroundings — a photo of an ostrich, to honor a former tenant of the area —an ostrich farm. Other more poignant neighborhood tie-ins are rooms in honor of past Wolfson patients. One set of rooms on a children’s floor is named in honor of Bolles student and San Marco resident Jonathan Soud, who passed away two years ago.
Work from neighborhood artists and others from around Jacksonville also is showcased prominently throughout the building.
Highlights of the new tower include expanded children’s and adolescent behavioral health services, state-of-the-art neurosurgical and cardiovascular surgical suites, the Baptist Neuroscience Institute, new children’s hematology/oncology/bone marrow transplant center, adult oncology and large patient rooms.
The tower was named after philanthropists J. Wayne and Delores Barr Weaver, who gave a $10 million gift to Baptist Health this fall. The building’s name was the idea of Baptist Health officials, not the Weavers.

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