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UNC Health’s Rex hospital in Holly Springs is expanding without actually getting bigger.
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The hospital has opened 24 new patient rooms in the building’s previously empty seventh floor. The new rooms increase the hospital’s in-patient capacity nearly 50% to 74 rooms.
UNC Rex opened its Holly Springs hospital in 2021 with a vacant top floor that it knew would be needed someday, according to spokesman Alan Wolf. The hospital received approval from state regulators a year ago to add 24 beds, at a cost of $18.5 million, and construction began a short time later, Wolf said.
The 24 new rooms are known as “observation beds,” a level below the hospital’s other 50 “acute care” beds. They’ll be used in situations where a patient is recovering from a knee or hip replacement or has been admitted with symptoms that need supervision but not a higher level of care, Wolf said.
“The project will help expand capacity to keep up with demand in that fast-growing region, allow for more admissions and reduce wait times,” he wrote in an email.
Holly Springs and the adjoining towns of Apex and Fuquay-Varina grew 28% in the first half of the decade, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Between them, the three towns had nearly 180,000 residents last year, according to the Census Bureau.
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The Triangle’s big three health systems — UNC, Duke and WakeMed — have been jockeying to serve fast-growing western Wake County for years.
UNC has also been approved to build a 126-bed hospital off N.C. 55 just south of Research Triangle Park. It expects to break ground on a medical office building and parking deck this fall and open the hospital in 2032, Wolf said.
Meanwhile, Duke Health has begun developing an 85-acre medical complex off High House Road in Cary, just west of N.C. 540, that will include a hospital with an emergency department, surgical services, imaging and inpatient beds.
And WakeMed has plans to expand its hospital on Kildaire Farm Road in Cary with a new, larger emergency department, new cardiac catheterization and heart labs and more inpatient beds. The scope and timing of that work may depend on WakeMed’s proposed merger with Charlotte-based Atrium Health.
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