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The flagship as its own system publishes it, November 2026: Memorial Hospital of South Bend, 615 N. Michigan Street, is Beacon Health System's flagship — the hospital the Epworth article's three beds of 1894 became. Its published measures: 526 beds in the system's own location description of the hospital; a designated Level II trauma center, the only Level II trauma center within ninety miles on Beacon's statement, and the region's only children's hospital and pediatric intensive-care unit (item 5) and only air-medical transport. Its present building event is the largest in its history: a ten-story patient tower, announced April 20, 2022 — seven patient-care floors, some 300,000 square feet, a renovated and expanded intensive care unit — carrying the hospital's adult acute-care beds from 249 to 302. The tower's cost prints in the record in two figures, unreconciled as its sources give them: $232 million in Beacon's announcement and every account drawn from it, and $257 million in the Tribune's end-of-2025 development review; no source reached reconciles the two, and the later figure is printed as the Tribune's, not substituted for the system's. The tower's dated course to the check date: groundbreaking in October 2022; structural topping-out on October 10, 2025; and, in Beacon's own August 31, 2026 account, the new twenty-six-bed adult intensive care unit on the tower's second floor preparing to receive patients in late October 2026, moved from its temporary home in the Leighton Heart and Vascular Center — with the remaining inpatient floors targeted to open in spring 2027. The flagship as of November 2026 is therefore a hospital mid-metamorphosis, and this article prints it in that state, not in its finished one: the 526-bed published measure stands; the tower stands topped out and partly entering service; the full 302-bed adult acute complement is a spring 2027 fact, not a November 2026 one. For Osceola, thirteen minutes of Lincolnway and McKinley west, this is the measured destination of the township's serious cases — a Level II trauma center in the middle of the largest building campaign in its 132 years.
Sources: Beacon Health System locations record for Memorial Hospital, read November 2026 — 615 N. Michigan St.; 526 beds; Level II trauma center; the Epworth-to-Memorial history. Beacon Health System (April 20, 2022) — the tower announced: ten stories, seven patient floors, $232 million, completion then projected March 2026. Beacon Community / Walsh Construction (October 2022; October 10, 2025) — groundbreaking; topping-out; 300,000 square feet; adult acute beds 249 to 302. South Bend Tribune, "Looking back at 2025 medical/residential growth in South Bend" (December 31, 2025) — the tower at $257 million, completion eyed for Q4 2026; the conflicting figure printed as its source gives it. Beacon Health System, "New ICU designed to enhance critical care" (August 31, 2026) — the twenty-six-bed ICU move in late October 2026; remaining floors targeted spring 2027.