|
Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital keeps expanding
By Sarah G. McC. Moise
Staff Writer
Less than two months after introducing its expanded emergency room, Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital announced its second big expansion, a $24 million project that will add an additional 40,000 square feet on top of its current West Ashley facility.
Currently the hospital has 141 medical/surgical beds for in-patient treatment, which will increase to 204 after the expansion.
“Right now we’re getting close to sheer capacity,” says Allen Carroll, CEO of Roper St. Francis. “We’re doing things like our ‘rapid admission unit,’ where patients that require admission come into a six-bed unit and have all of their physicians’ orders started there.” As beds become available, patients are moved into the appropriate units.
“This expansion is a huge undertaking,” he says. The hospital plans to add a fifth floor with 36 new beds to its existing patient tower, while another three beds will be added on the hospital’s fourth floor.
Another 24 beds will be added to the Women’s Center to address the rapid growth in women’s services at St. Francis for postpartum or gynecological surgical stays. “We’re really challenged there,” reports Carroll. “St. Francis has a long history of women’s services. We’ve always run really tight on obstetric service because of demand.”
Carroll attributes the hospital’s growth to three causes. First, the Lowcountry is growing in population, with more people moving here from the upper Midwest and Northeast. Second, as the baby boomers age out, they require more health care as they get into chronic disease stages requiring treatment for heart disease, cancer and orthopedic problems.
Lastly, he says St. Francis is uniquely positioned geographically to take advantage of these growth markets. “It’s easy to get to from I-526 without having to go downtown and fight traffic and parking,” he says.
Clearly there is a need. St. Francis has been running at or near capacity for 11⁄2 years, completing a new $6 million, 11,000-square-foot emergency room expansion and filling up its three medical office buildings on the campus.
The West Ashley facility discharged 8,778 in-patients in 2004, up from 7,900 in 2000. The number of inpatients treated at the hospital has grown 11% in the last five years. This phenomenon is expected to continue as 53,500 people are anticipated to move into the tri-county area by 2015, according to census predictions. The hospital treats patients from virtually the entire Lowcountry, with admission from Berkeley, Dorchester and Charleston counties.
“I see it as a national phenomenon,” says Carroll. The state’s health plan corroborates St. Francis’ growth based on its calculations of South Carolina’s demographics, as does the unprecedented building boom in Charleston area hospitals.
Roper Hospital downtown is presently constructing a $77.4 million patient tower to be completed in 2006. Nearby on Courtenay Street, the Medical University of South Carolina has started work on a $300 million hospital. And Summerville Medical Center is finishing an $11.8 million expansion of its emergency room.
The East Cooper Regional Medical Center is expecting to expand to meet the population boom in Mount Pleasant. Trident Medical Center in North Charleston is completing a $60 million renovation and expects to propose another project this year.
When St. Francis moved off of the Charleston peninsula in 1996, it anticipated the need for the campus expansion as part of its long-term vision.
“We have a 90-acres campus and we’re at about 40 percent capacity. We sized all of the structures to handle additional floors.” The building’s footings and steel were engineered to withstand added weight to its four current floors.
Hospital officials hope to complete the drawings and have the certificate of need approved by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control within six months, in order to begin construction in 2006 and occupy the beds in the first quarter of 2008.
Sarah Moïse is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at smoise@crbj.com.
|
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Version