The paint is still drying on the walls of Hillsborough’s new hospital, but this Saturday, UNC Health Care officials are opening the doors to let the public see the four-story facility for the first time.

Jeff Strickler is the associate vice president for UNC Health Care’s Hillsborough Campus. He says the new 68-bed facility is designed to be a community hospital.

“This emergency department has ten rooms and is projected to see somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 patients per year. It is a fully-capable emergency department; we have emergency medicine here 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We can take all ages from newborn delivery all the way up to an elderly patient.”

It will also be the new home for several departments currently located in Chapel Hill. Strickler says many elective surgical practices will relocate to Hillsborough, including joint surgery, spinal surgery, ophthalmology and gynecology.

“We went to a number of our physicians and said, ‘are you interested in coming to Hillsborough?’ They evaluated their patient population and their own service needs and those were the services that said, ‘yes, we see a benefit to our patients and we’d like to come to Hillsborough.’”

The medical offices are already open in a building adjacent to the main hospital. The emergency department will begin taking patients in July. Outpatient surgery and inpatient services are slated to begin in August and September.

But before that happens, members of the public are invited to take a look around. Strickler says the open house might be your best chance to see the inside of an operating room without having to be wheeled in on a gurney.

The hospital will be open to the public for self-guided tours from 2 pm-4 pm on Saturday at 430 Waterstone Drive in Hillsborough. You can find more information here.

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