Norway hospital addition improves patient, family use
By Gail Geraghty
Staff Writer

NORWAY – Spacious, modern and patient-friendly are the words that describe the $7 million phase one expansion at Stephens Memorial Hospital.

The expansion is ahead of schedule, and will be finished by the end of this year, said Tracey Geary, the hospital’s director of development on Monday.

As soon as it is complete, the general contractors from H.P. Cummings Construction Co. will begin work on renovating the existing hospital.

Instead of three emergency examination rooms, there’ll be nine, all private, with their own doors. A larger state-of-the-art trauma room will be located just inside the new, separate entrance for ambulance services. There will also be a family room near the trauma room, so family members can be closer to their loved ones than the general waiting area.

“We’re not really doing anything new,” Geary said. “We’re just providing it in a way that is more patient and family-friendly. We’re trying to centralize services.”

A new Women’s Imaging Center on the main floor will provide a single location for all women’s imaging, including mammography, bone density testing and ultrasound.

There will be separate rooms for central patient registration. As it is now, strangers sit side by side explaining their medical needs to medical workers, separated only by a glass partition.

There will be separate waiting rooms for different departments, whether it be emergency services or radiology. And instead of winding their way to the basement for pre-admission testing, patients scheduled for out-patient surgery will be able to complete the testing upstairs.

The new emergency room has a much larger nurses’ station, and even a lunch room in the back, which they don’t have now. A 24-hour room with bed is provided for staff working very long shifts.

Viewing windows in adjoining offices and the nurses’ station allow staff to monitor what’s happening. “The visibility for this whole area is very good. You can see people as they come in,” Geary said.

By the end of this year, the old entrance will be torn down and replaced with a new entrance, to the right of the old one. The lobby will be dominated by the main information desk, below a high-peaked ceiling letting in lots of light. To the right of the information desk will be central registration, across from a large waiting room equipped with a canteen.

In the existing hospital, the coffee shop will be expanded and upgraded and a meditation area will be built about where the current information desk is located now. Phase two improvements in the existing hospital will be completed by early next summer, Geary said.

The endoscopy and minor procedures suite, previously sharing operating room space in the basement, will be moved upstairs. Instead of a mobile, two-days-a-week trailer for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, there will be a fixed MRI machine available seven days a week on the ground floor.

The basement will also include two operating room storage rooms, and a huge room for storing imaging files, or X-rays. A large area of the basement will be reserved for future growth.

The project was funded by a $7 million capital campaign, and construction began about a year ago.

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