Nemours Children’s Health plans to expand its pediatric hospital and develop two new facilities on its Lake Nona campus, spending $300 million in Central Florida during the next four years, the health system announced this week.

The 110,000-square-foot expansion of the pediatric hospital will double the size of its emergency department, increase space for the hospital’s imaging department and add new inpatient beds and observation rooms.

The hospital also plans to expand its surgery department, orthopedics division and sports medicine and rehabilitation services.

The new facilities should be ready for patients by 2028.

Central Florida’s pediatric population is now about 1 million and is is expected to grow by nearly 5% in the next five years, Nemours said, so the expanded facilities will help the hospital meet that demand. Nemours now serves more than 300,000 children in Florida at its hospital and other facilities.

“This investment is designed to care for more children, many of whom require highly complex care,” said Martha McGill, president of the Central Florida region for Nemours Children’s Hospital, in a statement.

Nemours opened in 2012 in what is now called Lake Nona’s medical city, home to the University of Central Florida’s College of Medicine and other facilities.

The Delaware-based organization once faced fierce opposition from Central Florida’s two biggest hospital and the state, which twice denied its application to build a hospital in Orlando, saying there was not a need for more pediatric hospital beds and that Nemours could harm the region’s existing pediatric hospitals.

Nemours later won approval to open and now says its expansion will help serve more children and offer services not available elsewhere. Those will include a new International Center for Limb Lengthening and a new Gait and Motion Analysis Lab, which Nemours says is the first and only accredited one in Florida.

“This expansion is a critical step in achieving our vision of bringing world-class children’s care to Florida,” said R. Lawrence Moss, Nemours’ president and CEO, in a statement.

The third part of the expansion will be an administrative building, including a new 800-space parking garage, set to be completed in 2027.