The $106-million emergency room and patient tower at Banner Boswell Medical Center, located in Sun City, Arizona, has recently topped out.
The new 40,000-square-foot ER, which is projected to open in fall of 2020, will provide much-needed additional capacity. Banner Boswell’s existing ER often runs at or near capacity. The new ER will increase capacity from 42 to 56 beds, allowing the department to care for up to 
60,000 ER patients annually. The present ER was built to handle up to 45,000 patients annually.
One of the innovative cost- and time-saving measures being deployed on the Banner Boswell project involves the use of prefabricated interior and exterior wall panels. The panels are constructed offsite and delivered to the jobsite for installation, saving approximately three months of construction time.
Most of the prefabricated panels – 770 of them – are being fitted to the outside of the buildings. These exterior wall panels average in size at approximately 8-feet-tall by 30-feet-wide and weigh an average of 2,400 pounds each. The tower crane lifts the panels – the heaviest weighing nearly 12,000 pounds and measuring 16-feet-tall by 33-feet-wide – so crews can secure them to the steel structure. Approximately 125 prefabricated interior wall panels will also be used on this project.
The tower’s first floor, to open in early 2021, will contain the main lobby, gift shop, retail pharmacy, admitting desk and chapel. The five floors above the main lobby will remain shell space, reserved for future inpatient rooms.
The construction project is being managed using Integrated Project Delivery with the owner, design team, general contractor and trade partners all co-located on the project site.
The general contractor on the project is McCarthy Building Companies. The architect on the project is HMC Architects. Other trade partners include Buehler & Buehler, Southland, Foothills Fire Protection, Schuff Steel, Cannon & Wendt, University Mechanical, Norris Design and The Berg Group.
