St. Luke’s Upper Bucks campus opens $79 million wing with birth center, citing need amid shrinking maternity options

St. Luke’s University Health Network has doubled the size of its Upper Bucks campus with a $79 million, three-story addition that expands access to obstetrics, a service that has been shrinking in the Philadelphia region.

The Milford hospital built a 117,275-square-foot wing to house a new labor and delivery unit with capacity to deliver 1,200 babies a year and to expand cancer care services. Officials said the new Women & Babies Pavilion was needed after many regional hospitals consolidated or eliminated delivery units due to high operating costs, leaving fewer places for people to give birth.

“One question the community asked us over and over again was, ‘When are you going to start delivering babies?’” said Dennis Pfleiger, president of St. Luke’s Upper Bucks and Quakertown campuses.

Doylestown Hospital and St. Mary Medical Center are among the other hospitals in Bucks County with labor and delivery units, but patients who wanted to remain with their St. Luke’s doctors would previously have had to travel a half-hour or more to the health system’s hospitals in Allentown or Northampton to deliver, Pfleiger said.

St. Luke’s operates 14 medical campuses in the Lehigh Valley, including locations in Bucks and Montgomery Counties in the Philadelphia region. The health system opened its Upper Bucks campus in 2019 as a 54-bed general hospital, with an emergency department and level 4 trauma center.

The Women & Babies Pavilion is on the addition’s second floor, featuring five labor and delivery rooms, 12 postpartum rooms, and two C-section suites.

On the first floor of the new building, the hospital has expanded cancer services to include new, state-of-the-art radiation technology, a bigger infusion suite, and new specialty oncology practices.

The third floor of the addition has not yet been built out, but is designed to accommodate 36 medical or surgical beds.

Pfleiger said the health system will seek community input on what services should be added in the remaining new space or pursued in a future expansion.