Hospital Prepares for Move to Route 1

When Princeton HealthCare System opens the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro in May 2012, it must say goodbye to its current site on Witherspoon Street.

“The (Princeton) property was rezoned as residential,” said Barry S. Rabner, Princeton HealthCare System president and CEO. “We are completing the process as we speak to sell it to be redeveloped into a residential site.”

The site has zoning approval for up to 280 residential units and 79,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, hospital officials said.

The hospital has hired BlueGate Partners, a real estate advisory firm based in New York, to help sell the property. Neither BlueGate
Partners nor hospital officials would disclose the property’s sale price.

A medical office building and parking garage open will remain on Witherspoon Street, Rabner said.

Patients and staff will transfer to Plainsboro on May 22, 2012.
Construction on the new $445 million hospital complex on Route 1 in Plainsboro began in October 2008, but hospital officials decided to expand in 2003.

“We recognized a need for a new hospital because the elderly population we served was growing,” Rabner said. “With an increased demand for services, predicted changes in technology and not enough space, we began looking to see if we could expand or move to a new location.”

The 9-acre site on Witherspoon Street was not large enough to accommodate these changes without buying up neighboring properties, Rabner said.

Instead, hospital officials decided to buy the 171-acre property
between Scudders Mill and Plainsboro roads.

“One of the reasons we selected the new site is because it’s closer to 70 percent of the people we traditionally serve,” Rabner said. “We think it will make life a lot easier for them.”

He said the hospital’s medical campus includes buildings for office research, assisted living, nursing and a fitness and wellness center.

The Route 1 location will also eliminate traffic on residential roads in Princeton, allow for future expansion and offer more parking.

The new hospital will have 235 beds in single-patient rooms compared to 215 beds in Princeton in double-patient rooms, Rabner said.

In double-patient rooms, the hospital sometimes has beds it can’t use because it can’t match patients to the same room based on age, gender or medical problem.

Single-patient rooms allow the hospital to accommodate all patients and reduce the spread of infection, Rabner said.

The new hospital site can also accommodate the future construction of two additional floors of patient rooms, increasing the total number of beds to 360, he said.

The hospital is working with Facility Development Inc., Phoenix, Ariz., to help pack and move equipment, relocate patients and prepare staff members to work at the new site come May.

“We’re still in the planning process, but FDI has helped transition hospitals more than 200 times,” Rabner said.

Hospital patients on Witherspoon Street will be taken by ambulance to the new site, said Andy Williams, the hospital’s marketing and public affairs coordinator.

With the hospital’s opening less than a year away, there has been speculation that actor Hugh Laurie, whose character on the TV show “House” works in the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, will be at the ceremony.

Rabner only laughed at the rumor.

“The irony strikes all of us,” he said. “The fact that there’s a TV show that takes place at our hospital, and now we’re actually opening a Princeton-Plainsboro hospital. We wish [Laurie] would come, but that’s not happening.”