St. Luke's to expand emergency room at Upper Bucks campus
St. Luke's University Health Network will expand the emergency department of its Upper Bucks campus, nearly doubling capacity.
The expansion to the hospital in Milford Township, Bucks County is expected to break ground soon and will add 12 new beds to the emergency room, bringing the total to 28 once it is completed in the second half of 2025.
The Upper Bucks campus opened in 2019 and is one of St. Luke's newer hospitals. Part of the reason for its construction was to move emergency, surgical and many other services from the aging St. Luke's Hospital-Quakertown, which the network acquired in 1995, to a newer state-of-the-art facility.
Sam Kennedy, a spokesperson for St. Luke's, said the expansion is based on community need. The hospital was built with the expectation that it would only need to accommodate 15,000 to 16,000 patients yearly. The network made a small expansion to the emergency department, which increased capacity to 22,000 patients yearly, but that proved to be inadequate. He said after the expansion capacity will increase to 40,000 patients yearly.
Kennedy added the expansion will only increase the size and capacity of the emergency department, with no other additions planned at this time.
This move follows the recent expansion of another one of its newer hospitals: In April, the network completed an $85 million, 165,000-square-foot expansion to St. Luke's Hospital-Monroe, which originally opened in 2016.
Like the planned expansion of the Upper Bucks campus, the Monroe campus in Stroudsburg was expanded due to increased community need. From fiscal year 2017 to fiscal year 2021, admissions and observations at Monroe increased 151% and emergency visits increased 61%, according to the network.
The new expansion, connected to the original structure's east side, added a 36-bed medical-surgical unit, more operating and procedural space, expanded outpatient services, an interventional radiology suite, pharmacy and a cardiac rehabilitation suite.
