photo by David Snow

Hospital seeks expansion

By David Snow (Contact) | Demopolis Times

Published Friday, September 5, 2008

Bryan W. Whitfield Memorial Hospital CEO Mike Marshall said the hospital is looking to expand and re-organize in the coming years, to help make the facility more efficient for its staff and its patients.

“In the last four years, we’ve had about 108-percent growth in our surgical area,” Marshall said. “We’ve had explosive growth back there, and we’ve basically outgrown our operating room area. We are fortunate enough through the Delta Regional Authority — Sen. Richard Shelby was instrumental in getting some Alabama counties into that project several years ago — to get a grant for the second year in a row to bring in a space planner to look at our campus footprint as well as the internal patient flow.

“We made a presentation to the board — we’ve been working on it since April or May. He came and made his final presentation to the board last week, basically showing us that we can grow in our services without outgrowing our footprint.”

Marshall said the growth would be done in phases, with the first phase being the operating room expansion, taking some space from the east side of the campus and expanding that to the south.

“That would give us the capability of expanding our OR complement,” he said, “and having a dedicated, free-standing orthopedic OR suite, which is larger than a standard suite because of the equipment being used, particularly with the anterior-access minimal invasive hip procedure. We were the first hospital in the state to do that, and it’s hard to get that equipment into our OR. It was built 50-something years ago.

“We also want to relocate our endoscopy lab from its current location, which is in geographically directly opposed parts of the hospital, and get them together, so those patients won’t have to go back and forth to different parts of the hospital for different parts of that procedure.

“We’ll be doing all of our pre- and post-op in one area,” he said. “When a patient actually enters the OR suite, they would never leave that suite. They would be discharged in a separate discharge area, which would be more private for them and allow them a little more privacy and dignity and keep them from having to go back and forth through several hallways.”

Marshall said they haven’t done any actual architectural work, but they have gotten cost estimates on the proposed project, which indicated that if the construction began today, the project would cost $1.3 million to $1.7 million.

“We’re going to try to get some fund-raising going for that,” he said, “not only in starting to raise the money for that, but also to get the public awareness out there.

“There might be some Congressional appropriations money out there that we’re going to take a look at.”

The hospital is hosting a 55th-anniversary ball at the Demopolis Civic Center next Saturday from 7 p.m. to midnight. Tickets are $50 per couple and $30 per individual. For more information, call (334) 287-2626.