Hospital wants $25 million expansion
By Steve Herring
Published in News on August 20, 2015 1:46 PM
It took less than 15 minutes Wednesday morning for Wayne Memorial Hospital officials to plead their case before a nearly empty room for state approval of a $25 million expansion project.
Hospital President Bill Paugh and Dr. Ben Eskra, medical staff president, were the only speakers during the state-conducted public hearing at the Wayne County Public Library.
Fewer than a dozen people, mostly from the hospital, attended the hearing.
State law prohibits health care providers from "acquiring, replacing, or adding to their facilities and equipment, except in specified circumstances, without the prior approval of the Department of Health and Human Services."
The intent of the law is to restrict "unnecessary increases in health care costs and limits unnecessary health services and facilities based on geographic, demographic and economic considerations."
Paugh and Dr. Eskra said the project would enable the hospital to continue to provide and to support "exceptional" patient care both now and in the future.
The hospital helps to improve health in the community through its care for patients and community outreach health and wellness programs that reach people in their workplaces, schools and other organizations, they said.
The project will update and replace the operating rooms that were originally built when the hospital opened in 1970, Paugh said.
"Medicine has changed a lot since that time, and we have really modified and done what we needed to do to make those operating rooms as contemporary in terms of equipment as we could," he said. "But we are running out of space.
"Things just take more space now. Really as we look at our endoscopy suite, those volumes have grown over time."
Also, it is separated from the rest of the surgical suite, Paugh said.
"We need to have them contiguous so that we can share staffing to include anesthesia staffing," he said. "The other thing that this will do it will allow us to have some state-of-the-art equipment.
"Radiography equipment in the operating suite is a permanent fixture. Right now we take portable units over when we do things. This will allow us to have the radiology equipment in the room so it is not rolling around banging across one thing or the other."
The hearing is a requirement in the process the hospital must complete to receive a certificate of need.
The hospital filed a request for the certificate of need with the state Department of Health and Human Services in June for the project that includes renovation of 50,000 square feet of existing hospital space and an addition of 40,000 square feet.
The existing space includes operating rooms, endoscopy, post anesthesia care unit, same-day surgery, registration, pre-admission testing, outpatient lab and staff support spaces.
The anticipated completion date is late 2017.
The hospital has awarded the approximately $2 million construction contract to T.A. Loving Co.