Community Medical Centers’ Board of Trustees today approved a four-year construction project that will add 144 private beds and expand several services at Clovis Community Medical Center. 

The $390 million, 190,000-square-foot expansion project will feature a five-story bed tower and will add 15,000 square feet to the hospital’s emergency room, create six additional operating rooms, 24 additional ICU beds, and expand the hospital’s radiology, pharmacy and laboratory services along with the kitchen and dining areas. The project also will include an additional parking structure and a two-story, 60,000-square-foot clinical and administrative support building. When the project is completed in 2022, Clovis Community will have 352 all-private inpatient beds while providing jobs for an additional 420 nurses, therapists, technicians and support staff.

“We need to significantly expand inpatient capacity in our hospital system, and this Clovis project is the quickest and most cost-effective way to do it,” said Tim Joslin, Community’s president and CEO.

Site work will begin next month, and Community anticipates the expansion project to employ some 2,500 construction workers, the overwhelming majority of them local. 

Funding for the expansion will come from Community’s operations and from donations.

The four-hospital system completed a similar expansion at Clovis Community in 2014, investing $320 million to double the hospital’s capacity and convert it to all-private rooms. And last month, a new parking garage and medical office building were completed at Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno.

A nearly 100,000-square-foot cancer center is under construction, expected to open in August. And Community’s Board of Trustees recently approved two additional projects: a 12-bed expansion at Community Behavioral Health Center and construction of a 150-bed skilled nursing facility in Clovis.

Joslin said, “The Clovis Community expansion is one part of a decade-long strategy to meet the Valley’s growing need for different kinds of inpatient and outpatient care settings—all of which must work together seamlessly.”

The Clovis expansion and other building projects will together add about 300 beds to the Community system and should help speed hospital access over the next few years, Joslin said. “But then we’ll also need a massive expansion on our downtown Community Regional campus to meet the demand we’re seeing for neurosciences, cardiac care, pediatrics, and other specialized services.”

Over the past 10 years, Community has invested more than $1 billion to expand and renovate its facilities, Joslin said.