Growing the Future for All Children

Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, ranked the #1 children’s hospital in Florida by U.S. News & World Report, plans to make care easier for more families through an array of expansion efforts.
Highlights of the hospital’s growth include building a new hospital in Wesley Chapel, expansion of space and services on and near the main campus in St. Petersburg, and the addition of new outpatient care services, including offering after-hours pediatric urgent care in Tampa.
“This is a historic time for our organization,” says Alicia Schulhof, M.H.A., FACHE, president of Johns Hopkins All Children’s. “We are committed to filling the needs in the community and making it easier for families to access our care.”
Johns Hopkins All Children’s is the regional pediatric referral center for Florida’s west coast, providing the area’s most complex care for children. The hospital is designated as a Level 1 Children’s Surgery Center, offering specialized surgical care for congenital diaphragmatic hernia, esophageal and airway treatment, and other complex conditions. The neonatal intensive care unit has the highest designation — Level IV — with extensive experience treating low and extremely low birthweight premature infants. The hospital has robust pediatric programs for cancer and blood disorders and neurosciences and offers specialized centers for cystic fibrosis, epilepsy and other childhood conditions. Johns Hopkins All Children’s is also recognized for the high-quality care and outcomes including its role serving as one of the largest pediatric heart transplant centers in the state and as a designated pediatric trauma center.
The hospital’s primary service area includes 17 counties and 1.2 million children. Regional pediatric growth has reached 4%.
“Physicians and community hospitals count on us to care for critically ill patients and perform complex surgical procedures,” Schulhof says. “We are a trusted leader in pediatric care, and we know there are more children who are in need of our expertise and compassionate, quality services.”
A Second Hospital
Pasco County is among the fastest growing regions in the Tampa Bay area. It and other areas north of Tampa Bay are projected to have pediatric population growth of 12% between 2023 and 2032. Currently, 93% of patients living in Citrus, Hernando and Pasco counties travel outside the market for pediatric specialty care.
Johns Hopkins All Children’s purchased a 112-acre site near Interstate 75 and Overpass Road in Wesley Chapel where it will build a 56-bed hospital, 16-room Emergency Center and clinic space with room to grow with the community. The complex will include four imaging rooms, four operating rooms and support services.
“We strive to bring care closer to home for families, and this site is 50 miles from our St. Petersburg campus,” says Justin Olsen, J.D., M.H.A., vice president and chief operating officer at Johns Hopkins All Children’s. “There is a profound need for specialized pediatric care in this growing community. We will be their children’s hospital. Families in Pasco, Hernando, northern Hillsborough, Sumter, Citrus, Lake, Marion and other surrounding counties will have easier access to Johns Hopkins-level care close to home.”
Construction on the Wesley Chapel hospital will begin in early 2025 with completion projected for 2027. This month, All Children’s Specialty Physicians began offering specialized outpatient services in cardiology, endocrinology and general surgery in leased space near Wesley Chapel. It will add pulmonology services in March.
The new hospital and other expansion projects will be financed through a combination of hospital equity and philanthropy.
Expansion in St. Petersburg
Johns Hopkins All Children’s is embarking on an expansion of space and services on the St. Petersburg campus that will enhance both inpatient and outpatient services.
The current hospital opened in 2010. A 28,000-square-foot addition will expand the Emergency Center and the second-floor surgical suite. Six convertible exam rooms will be added to the Emergency Center, which faces Sixth Street South on the hospital’s west side. The rooms are designed to better accommodate and serve patients with behavioral health conditions.
The second-floor expansion will include four of the hospital’s largest operating rooms, accommodating complex procedures and greater capacity to serve patients. The expanded space will allow for interventional radiology to move to a more convenient adjoining space and an additional MRI unit to move into the building. Construction is expected to start in spring 2025 with completion projected in 2026.
“These solutions focus on the safety of our patients, which is always our priority,” Olsen says. “Our operating rooms often run at close to capacity, so these additional ORs will expand patient access and accommodate increasingly complex procedures.”
The increased demand for pediatric outpatient services is creating a domino effect with transitions of space. In order to better accommodate patient care needs and the expansion of programs, physical and occupational therapy and the physiatry clinic will move from the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Child Development and Rehabilitation Center three blocks south of the hospital to the nearby Bayfront Medical Plaza. The hospital hopes to complete the move by Jan. 28, 2025. Added patient capacity will create greater scheduling opportunities and an enhanced experience for patients and families.
“The demand for our services continues to grow, and we are rising to meet the challenge,” says Michelle DuJardin, J.D., FACMPE, FACHE, executive director of the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hough Family Institute for Brain Protection Sciences. “We are investing in the expansion of rehabilitation services to accommodate more patients and offer exciting new programs.”
To meet the rapidly increasing need for pediatric behavioral health services, the existing Child Development and Rehabilitation Center space will also be repurposed to expand outpatient behavioral health programs and services. The Center for Behavioral Health at Johns Hopkins All Children’s will have additional space to add psychologists, neuropsychologists, psychiatrists and other providers over the next three to five years.
Care Closer to Home
Johns Hopkins All Children’s aims to extend its mission beyond its walls by providing patients and families with seamless access to care throughout west-central Florida.
For decades, Johns Hopkins All Children’s has enjoyed collaborative agreements with several community and regional hospitals to manage certain pediatric services, such as newborn medicine, in those hospitals.
“We partner in ways that enable us to more broadly advance our mission, reach beyond our existing regions, and deploy our team’s expertise widely and bring our high-quality pediatric care closer to home for our patients,” Schulhof says.
In 2023, Johns Hopkins All Children’s added an outpatient care location in Lakewood Ranch, bringing adolescent medicine, pediatric cardiology, neurology, rheumatology, endocrinology and diabetes care to that area. The addition of pediatric specialty services in Wesley Chapel marks 11 outpatient care locations in west-central Florida, in addition to the primary outpatient center on the St. Petersburg campus.
Although Johns Hopkins All Children’s is a dedicated children’s hospital, the care often begins with a mother well before the child’s birth. The hospital has long been recognized for its exceptional maternal-fetal medicine services. Those services also are expanding to offer specialized care for expectant mothers with high-risk pregnancies in more locations and closer to home, including a practice in Trinity in the western part of Pasco County and plans to expand this year to Lee County. Additional OB-GYN services will come to Pasco, near State Road 54 and the Veteran’s Expressway, in 2025.
As consumer preferences change and sites of service expand, many more families are choosing to access care in different care settings. An analysis of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Care Network data indicates more than half of Emergency Center visits are avoidable, and many could be handled in an urgent care setting. Therefore, Johns Hopkins All Children’s will also begin offering a new service in December — after-hours pediatric urgent care. On weekday evenings, holidays and weekends, the hospital’s outpatient care location in Tampa will provide urgent care for families whose children are sick or have minor injuries that don’t require emergency-level care.
“We have listened carefully to our community physicians and families,” Schulhof says. “We are excited to respond to their stated needs through the deployment of our growth strategies. We have one mission in mind: to make healthier tomorrows for All Children as we provide the very best care to more kids and their families.”