MICHELLE WILLARD, Post Content Editor
Posted: Sunday, February 21, 2010 6:07 am

MTMC Project Manager Jennifer Garland shows some of the features in the new patient rooms at the new hospital. The new state-of-the-art, private patient rooms are 277 square feet, up from 180 square feet at the old building. TMP/ M. Willard

Rutherford County’s first hospital was built in 1927 thanks to an investment from New York.

After years of public health demonstrations, the Commonwealth Fund of New York built the nation's first modern hospital for a rural community in Murfreesboro.

Rutherford Hospital was a 37-bed nonprofit hospital with the mission to operate “for the welfare of mankind.”

In six short months, the hospital will take a new place in the county as a 286-bed facility with additional unfinished space for more beds in anticipation of the county’s continued growth. The nearly 600,000 square feet of new construction includes 10 surgical suites, 32 intensive care beds and 30 obstetrical beds, as well as a state-of-the-art Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Patient and family comfort will also be state-of-the-art and central to the new facility.

“The new hospital will provide more of a healing environment for patients,” explained Gordon B. Ferguson, president and chief executive officer of MTMC. “The patient rooms are nearly double the size of our current rooms and they have large windows to provide natural light.”

Natural light is a theme throughout the new MTMC with large windows in every rooms and hallway.

The light is good “for healing the mind, body and spirit,” said Jennifer Garland, project director, adding placement of the windows was important to the design of the building, as well as patients and visitors.

“It’s more friendly and open to families than the current building,” she said.

Even the rooms are friendlier to patients and families.

The new private patient rooms are 277 square feet, up from 180 square feet at the old building, which have areas for the patient, family and caregiver.

“It gives every body more room — staff, patient, family,” Garland said.

The light-filled, modern building is quite a change from the current building, which grew from a 1913 Middle Tennessee Normal College and the local Red Cross grant request to the Commonwealth Fund of New York.

It wasn’t until 1924 that Rutherford County was named as one of four demonstration counties in the nation, which began a five-year program to build a public health system for the children of the county.

The program taught rural Rutherford County children proper hygiene, immunized the community against small pox, diphtheria and typhoid fever and conducted “Well Baby Clinics” for mothers.

But in 1927, the Commonwealth Fund made its greatest contribution to the community: The Rutherford Hospital.

“With the assistance of the Commonwealth Fund, the county's health care program had evolved into more than a sound local project; it was now assuming a position of statewide importance,” historian Carroll Van West in an article about the Rutherford County Health Department.

What began as an experiment in public health has grown into a major testament to the people of Rutherford County.

Build in 1927 as a 37-bed facility, Rutherford Hospital was expanded and expanded and expanded until it filled the original 8-acre campus plus some with parking lots and employee parking garage.

It even expanded its name to the Middle Tennessee Medical Center in 1982 and in 1986 partnered with Nashville’s St. Thomas Hospital.

The largest expansion came in 1990, which added the 70,000-sqaure foot Baptist Women’s Pavilion East and renovated the 80,000-square foot original facility.

In the end MTMC occupies 20 acres, along with its 8-acre main campus, in Murfreesboro’s Historic District.

Being land locked put the brakes on the hospital’s future expansion.

“Our strategic planning process indicated we needed to expand but expanding in our current location was not in our best interests as we looked at it over the next 20 to 50 plus years,” Ferguson said.

But that will change soon when the new facility opens on Medical Center Parkway.

In October, MTMC will move to its new 68.5-acre campus and into its new almost 60,000-square foot building.

Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com.