Fort Belvoir Community Hospital Tracking Well for Spring 2011 Opening

FORT BELVOIR, Va  — The $806.9 million Fort Belvoir Community Hospital Military Construction project, which began Nov. 8, 2007, is 60 percent complete and on schedule for completion in spring 2011, said project team members.

The Norfolk District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers manages the project’s construction phase, which is on an accelerated timeline as mandated by the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, authorization. Once completed, the Joint Task Force National Capital Region (medical) will staff and equip the facility.

To meet the accelerated construction timelines dictated by BRAC, the project is being constructed through an Integrated/Design/Bid/Build, or IDBB procurement. This innovative process uses a construction contractor well before traditional processes would have allowed to increase constructability, provide accurate cost/schedule impacts of design decision, and help improve coordination resulting in fewer design omissions and errors.

The hospital was designed by a joint venture team of HDR, Alexandria and Dewberry of Fairfax, Va. Both are AE design firms. It is being constructed by the joint venture comprised of Turner Construction of Arlington, Va., and Gilbane Building Company, based in Providence, RI.

Turner Construction is engaged in many types of construction projects, including office buildings, high-tech facilities, hospitals and healthcare facilities, hotels, retail, educational and cultural buildings. The Gilbane Building Company worked on such notable projects as the Baltimore Convention Center, the Baltimore Center for Innovative Technology, Union Station and The National Air and Space Museum.

The 1.275,000 sq. ft. military construction project features a six-level community hospital, including medical administration areas. The design includes 120 in-patient beds, a 10-bed intensive care unit, a 10-bed behavioral health inpatient unit, a cancer center, an emergency department, pharmacy, operative services center with 10 operating rooms, diagnostic centers such as pathology and radiology, and modular clinic space dedicated to outpatient services. Additional space is planned for future outpatient expansion. In addition to the square footage of the facility itself, the project includes two parking garages and surface parking for 3,500 parking spaces, a helipad, ambulance shelter and dedicated central utility plant.

The Fort Belvoir Community Hospital will become part of an integrated health care network providing world-class medical services to the nation’s wounded Soldiers and their families. The hospital is one piece of a realignment designed to increase hospital and outpatient care to all service members and veterans under BRAC 2005. Other elements of the health care network include the realignment of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Naval National Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

The new facilities will be jointly staffed rather than single service billets with a mix of military medical professionals from the Army, Navy and Air Force. This unprecedented and transformational decision ushers in a new model for health care delivery in the National Capital Region. While military hospitals have traditionally provided care to beneficiaries from all services, military treatment facilities were never staffed with a representative mix of medical personnel from the service medical departments.