New $278 Million Hospital Taking Shape in West Virginia
By George Hohmann, Charleston Daily Mail, W.Va.
Jul. 28–BRIDGEPORT — The steel skeleton for United Hospital Center’s new $278 million hospital is quickly taking shape here.
The 289-bed hospital — with all private rooms — is being built on an easily accessible site just off the Jerry Dove Drive exit of Interstate 79. It is a stone’s throw from the FBI, the White Oaks and Charles Pointe mixed-use developments, the Bridgeport Conference Center and the North Central West Virginia Airport.
That’s a big change from United’s current location: an out-of-the-way corner of Clarksburg, several miles from the nearest four-lane.
Hospitals are subject to a lot of wear and tear because they’re open around the clock, seven days a week. Portions of the existing hospital were built in 1959. “Every resource eventually needs to be replaced,” said United President Bruce Carter. “That was coming true here.”
Eight years ago United’s directors began planning for the future. “They received a couple of master plans that detailed over $100 million worth of work that would have to be done at a bare minimum because there were so many problems, ranging from the parking garage to the building’s guts, like its electrical distribution systems and plumbing,” Carter said. “The heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems needed work, the emergency power — the list went on and on. And we had outgrown almost every single department.”
After an architect and engineers were called in, the list of needs surpassed $125 million. The board said, “Whoa!” when it also learned it would take 12 to 15 years to do the upgrades because everyone would have to work around the patients. “It would have been totally inefficient,” Carter said. When the directors did a cost-benefit analysis of remodeling vs. building a totally new campus, “it was a no-brainer,” he said.
One of the new hospital’s great advantages will be the private rooms.
“Almost all of the rooms we have now are semi-private,” Carter said. “Patients despise them. You’re sick and 12 inches from another bed. There are kids running around, the TV is blaring, there’s no privacy. You’re sharing a toilet. There are infection control issues. It’s not a comfortable environment. And you can’t accommodate families.”
The new hospital will have 289 inpatient rooms. “Every single one will be private,” Carter said. “The beds will face the window rather than walls. And the view sheds are beautiful — trees and ponds.”
United will see 400,000 outpatients this year, but the existing hospital wasn’t built for them. “We have terrible space deficiencies in every department,” Carter said. “We’re constantly doing work-arounds.”
United’s Emergency Department is approaching 50,000 visits a year. “By evening it is often overflowing with patients in the halls or waiting area,” Carter said. That problem should disappear when the new hospital opens because the number of observation rooms is going up, from 21 to more than 40.
There will be some big improvements in the hospital’s surgery suites, too.
“In the old days there was a table, a couple of doctors and nurses and an instrument tray,” Carter said. “Now the room is a sea of technology. Our new surgery suites are three times the size of a lot of our suites now.”
The new hospital will contain 681,440 square feet of space, up from the existing facility’s 440,000 square feet of space. The new campus will have parking for 2,570 vehicles, up from 1,376.
As for the new hospital’s overall design, “we expect to do it one time and want to do it right,” Carter said. “So we’ve spent a lot of effort looking at what department is next to what and how you can create greater privacy. For example, this (new) building is wrapped on the first three floors with a three-story outpatient mall. It’s like you walk down a mall and go into a department store. That’s how our departments will be aligned. The visitors and outpatients will go in the front and walk down the mall and go into whatever department they need to access. We’ll push the departments to the front.”
Support departments will be further away from visitor and patient traffic. The movement of materials and patients will be kept separate.
“We sent teams out and toured a lot of new hospitals,” Carter said. “Our Emergency Room people visited new ERs. Surgery visited new surgeries. We got a lot of good ideas from new facilities that have been done in the last five or six years.
“Architects and space planners bring new concepts to you also,” he said. “You get so used to what you have you stop being able to see something different. We tried to break out of that. We hired consultants and sent teams to Michigan, New Jersey and Virginia.
“Every department will benefit simply by having the proper space,” Carter said. “Some, like our pharmacy, were critical. We were doing things in closets, with people stacked up in little rooms.”
The new eight-story building was carefully designed so it can be expanded. “Vertically, we can add two more floors without having to do anything with the guts of the building,” Carter said. “We can just take the roof off, bring in the cranes and move up. We will have all of the mechanical — the guts issues — ready. You pay up front for that. My hope is, 15 years down the road somebody will say something nice about me.
“Horizontally, your growth tends to be in the outpatient areas,” he said. “Our ER and diagnostics and surgery are on the first floor (of the new building), carefully designed so they can expand outward toward the back of the building. We have the expansion plans all ready to go so when we get there, if needed, we can connect in without chopping anything up. All of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning is oversized to accommodate that.”
Carter said the 1970 merger of St. Mary’s and Union Protestant hospitals “was a stunning example of how two religious communities, a Catholic and a Protestant, got together and said having two hospitals is not in the best interest of the patients, the doctors or the community.” They decided to have one hospital so they could have more programming, lower costs and recruit more doctors. “And that’s what they did,” he said.
“United Hospital Center is the fifth largest in the state and has the lowest cost and charges of anybody in our peer group,” he said. “We are up to 180 doctors now.” Since the merger, “we’ve been able to get into angioplasty programs, we have a fully accredited cancer center, we have neurosurgery. They wouldn’t have been able to do these things if they had stayed small.”
Although the cancer center is one of the existing hospital’s most important features, “it’s actually in two buildings on three floor levels,” Carter said. “It’s very confusing. In the new building it will be on the first floor, all pulled together in one place. The doctors will have their own parking, their own entrance.”
The front of the new building will be wrapped in a healing garden. “There will be green space in front so stressed-out parents or a child with a parent in intensive care can go out and sit in a beautiful garden.”
“We will have a lot of retail space to accommodate visitors in the front of the mall,” Carter said. “One of the spas in town will put in an ancillary spa. They approached me and I thought, ‘What?’ But the more they talked to me about massages and getting your hair done, the more it made sense. People are often killing time in hospitals. I checked it out.”
Carter praised United’s current directors for their vision.
The hospital, which currently has a staff of 1,850, expects to add at least 60 full-time positions when the new facility opens in 2010.
Contact writer George Hohmann at busin…@dailymail.com”>business@dailymail.com or (304) 348-4836.
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