As Halifax Health marks half a decade of treating the sick and injured and giving them a place to rest and begin recovering from their maladies, the facility is looking to the future, as well as the past.

Halifax Health in Deltona is set to build out and fill up the empty space within its prime care facility to add more medical services for a fast-growing medical market in the Interstate 4 growth zone between Orlando and Daytona Beach.

“We just celebrated our five-year anniversary,” Halifax Health Deltona Administrator Ben Eby said, addressing a group of West Volusians invited to a briefing and tours of the hospital Feb. 14.

Eby termed the location of Halifax Health Deltona as “strategic, right on the corners of DeLand, Deltona, Lake Helen and Orange City.”

“There is more opportunity here to grow,” he continued. “We will continue to bring services here. … My goal is that people in West Volusia never have to leave West Volusia for health care.”

Having morphed from a free-standing emergency department in April 2017, the $153 million Halifax Health hospital in Deltona opened for business Feb. 4, 2020 — just in time to be tested by the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

“With the pandemic, we were full,” Eby said.

Halifax Health in Deltona opened with 43 patient beds, as licensed by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. Thirty of those beds are for medical/surgical patients, and 13 in the intensive-care unit.

The hospital will finish its fourth and sixth floors, allowing for a total of as many as 90 patient beds.

Moreover, the emergency department will more than double in size. The unit now has 12 beds, but that number will increase to 30, with the addition of 12 examination rooms, along with six observation rooms.

“Our 12-bed emergency department is having a hard time,” Eby noted.

Besides the daily average of three or four ambulance calls coming to Halifax Health Deltona each day, the department gets its share of patients driving themselves, friends or loved ones injured to the hospital for falls, broken bones, on-the-job injuries and other misfortunes.

“We’re here 24/7,” Halifax Health Deltona Chief of Staff Dr. Miguel Rodriguez said. “We’re still growing.”

The coming enlargement of Deltona’s Halifax Health will cost approximately $30 million, Halifax Health Business Development Coordinator Victor Ramos said.

The Halifax Health hospital in Deltona is located at 3300 Halifax Crossing Blvd., very close to the interchange of Interstate 4 and State Road 472.