LINCOLN – Penobscot Valley Hospital officials hope to break ground within a month on a new wing that will give the hospital a state-of-the-art surgical facility, they said Monday.

Officials are awaiting a final cost estimate from Pizzagalli Construction Co. of South Portland and have secured $3.8 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the project, Bonnie Deveau, the hospital’s director of business development, said.

“We still have a lot of preliminary work being done, but we would like to break ground sometime this fall,” Deveau said Monday.

Once the cost estimate is in, the hospital will seek a final go-ahead from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which should be quickly forthcoming.

The state agency already has approved the hospital’s certificate of need for the project, she said.

Under the plan, the hospital’s single-suite surgical theater will expand to two suites, allowing doctors to perform major and minor surgical procedures simultaneously, Deveau has said.

Penobscot is a 25-bed critical access hospital that handles about 11,000 admissions and 34,000 outpatients annually in the Lincoln area. It opened in 1973.

Johnson Johnson & Crabtree Architects of Nashville, Tenn., has designed and slightly expanded the operating room to about 8,800 square feet, Paul Smith, executive director of hospital support services, said.

With surgeons forced to share the one operating room, delays are common, and the business that the hospital can handle is limited.

The new operating room, it is hoped, will help attract more physicians to the area and lead to better patient care, Deveau said.

“Once this operating room is finished, the surgical services will be good for 25 years, at least,” Smith said. “It will be large enough to accommodate any needs.”

The new surgical suites shall include a new central sterile instrument reprocessing area and a new room for endoscopic procedures, Smith said.

The hospital’s waiting room and switchboard areas were remodeled under a previous construction project that cost about $160,000 and finished during the summer.