Friday, March 29, 2024

Replacement hospital for Lake Chelan Health on schedule, budget

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CHELAN - Construction of Lake Chelan Health's hospital is on time and on budget, according to conversations with Agustin Benegas, Communications Manager for Lake Chelan Health and George Rohrich, CEO of Lake Chelan Health.
The hospital will be completed in August or September of 2022, Rohrich said. The total budget of the project is $44.5 million dollars. The construction budget for the project is $28.48 million dollars. The project qualified for a loan through the USDA.
The numbers of the budget have not changed, Rohrich said. The budget is locked through a program which went through an application and approval process with the USDA. The budget cannot be changed without coordination between the board of commissioners and other agencies.
The plan was to break ground in the Spring of 2021, Rohrich said. The construction of the hospital was paused from February to August of 2020 to reevaluate and make corrections on the project so it could be successful, Rohrich said. The pause did not delay the construction because ground would not have been broken in the winter.
Since the project is a replacement hospital on the east side of town, which is far from the existing hospital, the construction does not interfere with current patient care, said Rohrich. The new building will be in open space next to Columbia Valley Community Health instead of being landlocked.
The age of the current hospital building and access to it are currently issues, Benegas said. The current hospital is on a hill and in the wintertime customers have had difficulty accessing the building. Semi-trucks with supplies have jackknifed in the driveway, making emergency access perilous.
The hospital was built in 1972, Benegas said, and a lot of areas need to be updated to current state and department of health standards. The hospital doesn’t have private rooms, but semi-private rooms were converted to private rooms during the pandemic.
“The spaces were designed right for back then and were good for a long time. But for us to have optimum workflows and provide care that patients want that's convenient and efficient, this building can’t do it,” Rohrich said.
Technology has advanced so much since 1972 that the old building doesn’t work well with modern healthcare. For example, when the hospital's CT machine was upgraded, a room in the hospital was remodeled and expanded so the upgraded CT machine could fit in the room, Benegas said.
Primary services that are provided in the new hospital will be very similar, Rohrich said.  Obstetrics, emergency services, surgery, therapy, imaging, a laboratory, a cafe and a traveling MRI will be available. However, every service will not be at the new hospital.
EMS and administrative functions are planned to be in the current hospital, Rohrich said. Currently, those functions are in a leased building in town right across the street from the hospital.  Additionally, two clinics, express care and specialty clinics are located in a building downtown and would be moved to the current hospital.
Moving administrative functions and the clinic to the old building is still under investigation, Rohrich said. Consolidating all of the hospital's services to the new hospital building and the existing building could help to save costs from lease and rental payments in the long term.
The construction company that is running the project is Bouten Construction, said Rohrich. The company was selected through a bidding and contracting process. Numerous subcontractors for the project for masonry, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, and other needs are handled by Bouten Construction.
Some aspects of going through the pandemic allowed the hospital to design the new facility to plan for future emergencies, Benegas said.  For instance, the pandemic unearthed that many hospitals did not have enough negative pressure rooms, Rohrich said.
A negative pressure room draws air into the room without pushing it out which means that highly infectious patients do not contaminate the surrounding space, Rohrich said. The new hospital will have a number of rooms with negative pressure capability
“You know this happened in 2020 and still is happening to a degree. And it could happen again. So we will be ready. Our facility will be built to be ready,” Rohrich said.
After the building is constructed, there will be a short period of time called commissioning where all the systems like electrical and plumbing are tested to ensure they are safe, Rohrich said. After that, equipment is moved in and final clearing and preparation happens. The move has to be very systematic, Benegas said, so that patient care can move efficiently and operations like the emergency department don't close.
“That movement piece is complex and has to be precise,” Rohrich said.
 If patients are in beds, they will have to be transported to the new facility, Rohrich said. As spaces empty in the current hospital, facilities that operate in the leased and rented buildings will move into those spaces, but that can’t be done until the spaces are vacated and prepped.
Despite the logistics of creating a new hospital, Benegas and Rohrich are excited about the new facility.
 “We're excited about this new facility for this community that continues to really grow in the amount of people that live here year round now,” said Benegas.

 

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