UF Health Jacksonville broke ground Thursday on an expanded trauma center named for former hospital CEO Leon L. Haley Jr.
Haley was 56 when he died in July 2021 after he was thrown from a personal watercraft in the Palm Beach Inlet.
The $90 million Leon L. Haley Jr. Emergency and Trauma Center will add 35,000 square feet to the facility and increase the beds from 78 to 125.
The first phrase should take 18 months to complete.
“We have been serving thousands upon thousands of patients and trauma visits annually for countless years, and we have outgrown it, quite frankly,” CEO Patrick Green said.
The state allocated $80 million and the city of Jacksonville an additional $10 million toward the project.
Among those at a ceremonial groundbreaking were Haley’s parents.
“Looking back on his life and his growing up years in Pittsburgh, little did I realize he would have such an honor in his name,” his father, Leon Sr., told those attending the ceremony.
“From the days of Leon’s residency at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, he made emergency and trauma care his passion,” his father said.
Haley Jr. was brought to UF Health Jacksonville in 2017 as the dean of the University of Florida’s College of Medicine in Jacksonville. He was named the hospital’s first Black CEO in 2018.
“My wife and I … miss our son deeply," his father said, "but as long as his name is on this building he will live in our hearts and in yours as well.”
