By Tim Bonfield
Enquirer staff writer

WEST CHESTER TWP. - With construction reaching its final stages, a $16 million surgical hospital at University Pointe in Butler County will be open by Sept. 1, officials said Thursday.

The surgical hospital is the second major piece of a medical campus along Interstate 75, just north of Tylersville Road, that was designed to grow with the expanding population of Butler and Warren counties.

"Many of the things we will be doing here were mandated five years ago to be done in a hospital," said Dr. Lesley Gilbertson, the recently named medical director of the surgical hospital.

The mini-hospital resembles a floor of a bigger hospital.

It has four operating rooms, two cardiac catheterization labs for diagnosing heart problems, eight beds for patients to stay as long as three days, and a collection of waiting areas, recovery rooms, offices and supply areas.

At full capacity, it will handle about 4,500 mostly outpatient surgeries a year, including gastric bypass, plastic surgery, hernia repair, knee surgery and gynecological procedures.

The surgical hospital will not handle emergency cases, heart surgeries or other complex cases. It will not be open on weekends and will not take pediatric cases, Gilbertson said.

University Pointe, which was launched in 2001, already has a medical building with a diagnostic imaging center, a helipad and offices for more than 60 specialists.

The 75-acre campus also includes a linear accelerator machine for cancer radiation treatment, a dialysis clinic and several non-medical businesses including two banks, a spa and a restaurant.

Construction has started on a second medical office building. Two more medical office buildings and an expansion of the cancer treatment center are to start within several months to a year. Later this year, officials will decide whether to build a community hospital with emergency services at the site - a project that could take four to five years to complete, said Allen Miller, vice president for planning and outreach at the Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati.

University Pointe has been one of Greater Cincinnati's most unusual medical projects because developers are building what amounts to a full-blown hospital one piece at a time.

E-mail tbonfield@enquirer.com