The Garden City Telegram
Email this story | Add Your Comment
| Read (0) Comments
Scott County considering new hospital
Published 4/24/2009 in Local News : Area coverage
By SHAJIA AHMAD
SCOTT CITY — Scott County Hospital officials are hoping the construction of a new $23.8 million building lies in the county's future. With blessings from county commissioners, the hospital is gearing up efforts to offer its proposal to county residents.
"Over the last few years, we've had to shrink to fit our environment," said Mark Burnett, the hospital's CEO. "There are some serious challenges we're dealing with, and if we don't address them now, we'll regress instead of progress."
Burnett said the county has slowly outgrown its 1950s-era hospital, given its increasing demand for health-care services, its original electrical and mechanical systems that have reached their life expectancies, a lack of space and storage facilities, and its need to attract, hire and retain more physicians with more up-to-date facilities and technology.
Both hospital administrators and county commissioners said they support the construction of a new building as opposed to the renovation of the current one, based on the completion of a feasibility study in February by Health Facilities Group LLC, an architectural design firm based in Wichita.
The firm estimates that renovating the building, bringing its mechanical and electrical systems and a storm shelter up to date and within federal fire code regulations and other repairs could cost the hospital just a few million dollars shy of a new building, or at least $22.7 million. Those numbers illustrate the extent of the renovations necessary, Burnett said. Some of those renovation costs are exacerbated by considerations such as lack of space around the building to expand to and a sanitary sewer line underneath the building that cannot be built over again and must be relocated, according to Kansas Department of Health and Environment regulations.
In addition, necessary immediate repairs to the mechanical and electrical systems would cost nearly half a million dollars. Hospital officials and county commissioners agreed those repairs would only band-aid long-term problems.
"The plans they've put forward have told us there's a definite need for improved health-care facilities in this community," Scott County Commission Chairman Larry Hoeme said.
However, Hoeme said he and other commissioners also must consider the major renovations and fire-code compliancy issues they said need attention at the Park Lane Nursing Home in Scott City. While the commission recognizes the need to address the issue soon and would support the hospital board's decision to ask the county to finance part of such a project, the commission must look at the issues as fiscally conservatively as possible, especially in the current economic climate, he said.
"Right now my personal feelings are that we need to be looking at a combined solution," Hoeme said. "If we're going to be spending multi-millions of dollars, that might be a better way to spend our dollars in the long term. We're going to have to look at the whole picture."
Growing Pains
Inside his office at the Scott County Hospital, Burnett pulled out two black and white photos of the hospital's main entrance taken in 1951, when the facility first opened.
Other than the one-story building's main sign above its double doors, the entrance mimics its present day image.
"Hasn't changed much has it?" Burnett said and laughed.
Space inside the building is a serious consideration they must accommodate every day, administration and hospital staff said.
Because there are not enough patient rooms, patients sometimes have to share a room, making privacy laws difficult for doctors to comply with, said Karma Huck, the hospital's chief operations officer.
Additional wings to the hospital were added during a major renovation in 1975, and an adjoining clinic was built in 1994 and expanded in 1999, but the need is outgrowing its current space, Huck said. Some medical equipment must be stored in spare patient rooms at the end of halls because no storage facilities exist on location, and bathrooms in patient rooms are not ADA-compliant and need updating, she said.
"This building is designed for 1950s health care, but this is 2009," Huck said. "We need more space to provide our range of services."
Attracting health care providers to western Kansas remains a long-term concern for many health-care centers in the region, but without the latest technology, that concern is exacerbated at Scott County Hospital, administrators say.
"If two physicians walked in right now with the right qualifications, I'd hire them on the spot," Burnett said. "But then I'd have no office space for them, no examinations rooms of their own for them to work in."
Daniel Dunn, one of three full-time physicians at the hospital and clinic on site, said one of his and his staff's primary concerns as a doctor is the lack of space, which has inhibited him and his colleagues from working as efficiently as possible.
The physician added that he would like to see the hospital expand its nuclear medicine capabilities, add another surgery suite and offer more space in its cardiac-rehab facility if a new hospital were possible.
"Our medical practice and patient volume have grown significantly, but our facilities have not been able to keep up with the complexity of this care," Dunn said. "A lot of people might say, 'Well, the hospital seems nice, so why build something new now?' Well, it's been very well maintained, but we do need more clinic space, we need more delivery rooms, and we need a new hospital to retain the physicians we have now and attract new ones in the future."
What's next?
The hospital board had considered a $12 million expansion project in 2005, but the plans were shelved because the hospital was running at a deficit at the time and could not see the project through, Burnett said.
In hindsight, the CEO said, the old project would have addressed only space issues and cosmetic repairs and would not have met many of the electrical and mechanical concerns facing the hospital now. In addition, the hospital has recorded record revenues since then, which is why the CEO is especially confident the time to act is now, he said.
If the public does not meet the project with approval if it comes to a vote, the hospital needs to spend at least a few hundred thousand dollars in the near future, repairs the hospital has been granted permission to put on hold while it sorts out its options.
One of its most primary concerns, Huck said, is that no safety shelter exists for hospital patients and staff in case of weather emergency because the hospital's basement is not code-compliant. In addition, Burnett said the hospital has taken a lot of "stop-gap measures" over the last few years to accommodate for some of the growing problems. For example, off-site buildings in three different locations east, west and south of the city house the hospital's emergency medical services, its business offices, storage facilities and more.
The board is offering copies of the inch-think study and proposed changes at the Scott County Public Library, the hospital and at other public facilities around town.
Burnett said he was fairly confident the project would be met with approval.
"Scott City is a very progressive city, and the hospital is one of its biggest employers," he said. "We'll present the information, but ultimately — and as long as we've got county in the hospital's name — it'll be up to the people in the voting booths who get to decide."
Found 0 comment(s)!
Twitter Updates
