Biloxi, Miss., Medical Center Needs $80 Million in Repairs
By Michael Newsom, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.
Nov. 6–BILOXI — Keesler Medical Center could have a submarine-like basement, said Brig. Gen. Jim Dougherty from his temporary office away from the hospital that he said will cost about $80 million to repair.
Dougherty, commander of the 81st Medical Group, said the hospital is tentatively scheduled to open to outpatients on Jan. 15. Inpatient care will begin in October 2006, but Graduate Medical Education will not resume until July 2007 at the earliest.
The medical center got water in the basement and first floor, when the Hurricane Katrina surge inundated the building. It wrecked the generators, the electrical system and the MRI and chemotherapy machines, among other equipment.
He said the main obstacle to overcome in opening the hospital is fixing the electrical distribution center. The generators and equipment lost to the flood had a total value of about $20 million, Dougherty said.
Dougherty said some have asked why the generators weren’t installed on the roof to protect them from flooding. Keesler officials will look to a plan that was used in Houston, when the downtown area flooded in the early 1990s and water-damaged power distribution systems in the basements shut down those hospitals for months.
“What they did is they made their basement into a submarine with reinforced doors, reinforced exterior walls, all that kind of stuff to make the basement impervious to water. That is what we are going to do,” Dougherty said. “It (the generator) is too big. It requires to be on the foundation, because some of these things are 56,000 pounds. They are too big to just jack them up.”
The damage forced a shutdown of the hospital to its thousands of beneficiaries and has dispersed the GME doctors, who were permanently re-assigned. The GME program trains about 100 doctors and nurses a year at Keesler.
He said the accreditation of the hospital hinges on GME students being able to see a variety patients.
He said the current beneficiary population is hard to gauge because demographics in South Mississippi have changed since Hurricane Katrina and little information is available, so this will factor into the accreditation.
Dougherty said it would be key for his doctors to go into local hospitals to keep the program alive.
“Our ability to partner with the local community, with the VA and the civilian health-care system will be key to having a solid enough network of care that can support the training of all of those doctors and nurses,” he said.
He said the process to bring back the GME program will also be hampered because of the way the national system is set up.
“The GME, for instance, is on an annual cycle. Every program starts on July 1 and runs through June 30, so we have got to be on that cycle, and I can’t start that until I have a hospital to do it with,” Dougherty said.
While the work is going on to make the basement watertight, Dougherty said about 400 medical center personnel, including doctors, have been working out of the base’s large dental clinic, providing certain specialties to active-duty personnel. Doctors treat about 350 active-duty patients a day, but the clinic is not big enough to open to the system’s retiree population.
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