McCarthy Building Companies recently completed the $243 million, five-story Banner Gateway Medical Center tower expansion project, located at 1900 N. Higley Road in Gilbert, Ariz. The expansion doubles the size of the medical center campus and is expected to add more than 600 new jobs to the campus.
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The 351,000-square-foot addition includes an expanded Women and Infant Services Unit with NICU, added space for inpatient cancer care by Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center (located on the same campus), and more space for surgical, emergency, endoscopy and imaging services, including four new operating rooms, a new MRI, as well as angiogram and endoscopy suites. In addition, the tower expansion increases inpatient beds from 177 to 286 with additional shell space to accommodate future growth, and the relocation of the helipad to the new tower’s rooftop.
“We’re excited we can offer this addition for our patients and the communities we serve,” said Darren McCollem, Banner Gateway’s chief operating officer. “As the state and particularly the East Valley continue to grow in population, we want to make sure we’re meeting the demands of quality health care. This expansion addresses the need for enhanced services that will help our patient populations now and in the future.””
In addition to the new tower, an expanded Women and Infant Services Unit opened last month, addressing the need for enhanced women and infant care, including labor, delivery and postpartum. This includes a new neonatal intensive care unit for babies that need extra care. Banner Gateway outgrew its previous eight-bed NICU, and added 16 larger rooms, a family lounge, and lots of windows for natural lighting. Banner also added five labor and delivery rooms and nine postpartum rooms. Two new surface parking lots were also constructed, adding 492 new parking spaces for visitor and staff use.
“We’re proud of the collaborative approach by our integrated project team, which was instrumental in bringing the expanded facility as quickly as possible to the community,” said Kurt Radtke, project director for McCarthy Building Companies who oversees the Banner Gateway tower expansion project. “We are all aware of the challenges that many construction projects are facing these days. Thanks to the solutions developed by our team with Banner, SmithGroup and our trade partners, innovations and risk mitigation strategies, the team drove savings back into the project to incorporate additional scope and upgrades. It’s a testament to the team’s exceptional coordination and creative thinking.”
The project was managed using a modified Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) with the owner, design team, general contractor and trade partners all co-locating in a virtual “big room” allowing for the project’s design and construction strategies to be developed and enhanced through a robust system of collaboration, solution innovations and coordination strategies being brought to the project to ensure operational excellence and end-user efficiency.
Some of the innovative cost- and time-saving measures on the Banner Gateway project included:
• Project delivery completed in five separate design packages, allowing construction to start prior to design-phase completing;
• Prefabrication of construction elements including exterior skin, bathroom pods, headwalls, and mechanical and plumbing components;
• Construction of building expansions on three sides of the hospital that occurred simultaneously.
As part of the IPD process, all the major building trade partners were contracted early in design to aid in target value design, constructability and Building Information Modeling (BIM) coordination prior to permit.
The architect on the project was SmithGroup with civil engineering led by Dibble Engineering and structural engineering led by PK Associates. Field Verified served as an exterior skin consultant. Major trade partners included AmFab Steel, MKB, AROK, Buesing Excavation, Delta Electric, Foothills Fire, KT Fab, Otis Elevators, Stafford Crane, SwissLog, TD Industries and Walters & Wolf.
Construction on the tower expansion began in February 2021 and some campus renovation work will continue into 2024. McCarthy Building Companies completed the initial Banner Gateway Medical Center campus in 2007.
