$481M Lee Health campus hits construction milestone

The construction of a new health care center in Fort Myers has hit a milestone.

Skanska, the Swedish construction giant, has topped off a hospital and medical office building Lee Health is constructing on a planned 53-acre campus at the intersection of Colonial and Challenger Boulevards.

The work was part of Phase 1 of the project, Skanska says in a statement. The first phase of the hospital and office building includes 18 operating rooms; 168 patient rooms, including 24 ICU beds; and 44 emergency department beds.

When complete, the new Fort Myers campus will include a five-story hospital totaling about 400,000 square feet of health care and office space. It will also include a 122,000 square-foot medical office building housing an ambulatory surgery center and will serve as the home of the Lee Health Musculoskeletal Institute.

It is scheduled to open in 2028.

Lee Health has said the project, which will replace Lee Memorial Hospital about five miles away, will cost $481 million.

Skanska, in its statement, says a major portion of the project is resilience and sustainability. That includes the construction of an emergency makeup water well that will keep air conditioning systems functional even when access to municipal water is cut off, as well as redundant power systems, dual-fuel generators and a reinforced building envelope built to withstand up to 150 miles per hour winds.

The site itself, the firm says, has been elevated beyond 100-year flood projections, “with an extra foot added to strengthen protection and safeguard uninterrupted patient care.”

According to Skanska, to reach the milestone topping off, about 700 workers on the site daily have put in more than 720,000 hours and poured more than 33,000 cubic yards of concrete.