The time has come for a major expansion of Eastern Maine Medical Center, the hospital’s CEO told a group of community and business leaders Thursday.

Norman Ledwin said an expansion of critical care space at the hospital would be in addition to new construction for outpatient services currently under way in Brewer and a new building possibly at the hospital’s health care mall on Union Street in Bangor.

“Today we need more beds in this system,” Ledwin told members of the Action Committee of 50 at a breakfast meeting at EMMC.

Laying the groundwork for specific proposals, the details of which EMMC doesn’t plan to introduce until later this year, Ledwin and other hospital executives said expansion is needed to meet growing demand. The crunch stems from an aging population and rural hospitals that send acutely ill patients to Bangor. Many EMMC departments are overcrowded and weren’t designed for the presence of computers, they said.

Ledwin’s plans aren’t confined to meeting patient volume from the existing service area, which includes northern and eastern Maine. He said EMMC wants to build new relationships with Canadian hospitals and businesses. Additionally, the hospital should be serving more patients from the west around Farmington and to the south toward Maine’s largest hospital, Maine Medical Center in Portland.

“Our friends in Portland might not like that,” he said. “If we can push the boundaries we will … a little.”

Ledwin’s expansion plans include:

. Tripling the size of the 19-unit neonatal critical care unit to meet demand from across the area extending from Rockland to Franklin County to Fort Kent.

. Expansion of the intensive care unit. The ICU has 38 beds in crowded conditions. Hospital officials say they will need 60 beds by 2010.

. Developing new relationships with the hospital in St. John, New Brunswick, and with a medical school in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

. Possibly developing a cyclotron in the Bangor area with Jackson Laboratory and the University of Maine. Radioactive isotopes produced by the expensive machine could be used with positron emission tomography scanners in research and could be sold to Canadian hospitals.

During their presentation, EMMC officials showed a video featuring interviews with long-time employees about changes in the hospital and the space crunch. They provided booklets and color brochures, including one titled “Growing Pains: Finding Room for Today’s Healthcare in Yesterday’s Space.”

The information said many patient rooms are nearly 30 years old and are half as big as necessary.

“With space so tight, often families ‘get away’ by taking a walk through our halls. Doctors may update family members on a patient’s condition by the nurses’ station or in the corner of a cramped waiting room,” the brochure stated.

To drive their case home, hospital administrators took small groups of Action Committee of 50 members on tours of the hospital Thursday morning after the breakfast. In many departments space was visibly tight. Nurses were jammed into areas overflowing with equipment, and in some places computers were perched precariously on inadequate shelves – their monitors askew so as to avoid hitting the back walls.