Topeka ? After 98 years at its current Topeka location, St. Francis Health Center is poised to move to the former Menninger psychiatric hospital campus west of the city.

The St. Francis board of directors voted 15-0 Wednesday to recommend buying 132 acres of the former Menninger campus, with an eye on building a state-of-the-art health park that could include a 250-bed hospital.

Mike Schrader, St. Francis president and chief executive officer, said the recommendation now goes to the board of directors of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth for a decision expected in May.

St. Francis officials have been discussing the need for expansion since 2005, two years after Menninger left the hilltop campus that had been its home for 78 years and moved its operations to Houston.

If approved by the Sisters of Charity board, the land would be purchased from seven separate owners, with the Menninger Foundation being the largest landowner in the area, Schrader said.

Total costs and a timetable for the St. Francis project are still to be worked out, but Schrader said a general rule of thumb in the hospital industry is $1 million per bed. That means a 250-bed hospital would cost about $250 million.

“It might be a little less (than 250 beds),” he said. “I don’t think it would be more.”

St. Francis’ existing hospital has 378 beds – a throwback, Schrader said, to the days when patients often stayed in the hospital four to six days. Today, admissions are for about half that duration, so fewer beds are needed.

The new health park would also include an emergency room, operating rooms and outpatient diagnostic services, he said.

Some Topeka officials have said they would prefer St. Francis to remain at its current location, close to the heart of the city and to other medical offices.

Schrader noted, however, that expanding the existing hospital would cost about the same as building a new one.

Construction at the Menninger site would have another advantage, he said – operations at the existing hospital would go on without interruption while the new one was built.

“It’s years of disruption, years of trying to listen to an infant’s heartbeat with a jackhammer going on outside,” Schrader said.