StoneCrest Medical Center CEO Neil Heatherly and Project Supervisor Narciso Tanguma look over plans for the surgical suite expansion at the hosptial. StoneCrest is adding four surgical suites to be finished by April 2009.
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Smyrna’s StoneCrest Medical Center expansion is coming along quickly.
In fact, it will be finished about a month ahead of schedule, and the hospital is looking at expanding again in the near future.
In January, the HCA/Tri-Star hospital announced plans to add 26 private patient rooms and add 12,000 square feet in a surgical suite expansion.
Construction on the new patient rooms began in April with a target completion date of January 2009, but should be finished by the end of the year, Heatherly said. The surgical suite expansion is began in May and is on track to be done in April 2009.
After this expansion is finished, the hospital is looking at adding a neonatal intensive care unit, expanding the existing nursery and obstetrics unit on the second floor, pending Tennessee Department of Health approval.
“That’s all we have planned at this point,” Heatherly said.
“The need is there now. We hope to proceed after the state approves,” he continued, adding 142 babies were born at StoneCrest last month alone.
Since StoneCrest opened its doors to Smyrna in November 2003, the hospital has seen tremendous growth patient visits. The hospital has served more than 315,000 patients, with 36,000 outpatient visits in 2007 alone.
Although the growth is welcomed, it has lead to some capacity problems that facilitated the need to expand.
The hospital was designed for expansion; the additional private rooms will be housed on the currently unfinished fourth floor. The additional rooms create a 33 percent increase in capacity and culminate in a 101-room hospital.
The private rooms will be finished out with wellness panels, explained Jenese Holland, StoneCrest’s associate administrator.
Wellness panels are steel walls that take the place of traditional drywall in the patient rooms and reduce the risk for hospital born infections. The walls also have rounded corners and handrails to reduce the risk for falls.
The rooms will also have seamless sink and shower fixtures instead of grout and tile also for ease of cleaning. They require less maintenance and can be easily disinfected, Holland explained.
“We can just wipe them down,” Holland said.
The surgical suite expansion adds 12,000 square feet of space in two finished and two unfinished suites, which increases the hospital’s surgical capacity by 50 percent.
Because the suites are larger in size, the hospital plans to use them for total joint replacement, spinal and other surgeries that require large equipment, Vice President of Clinical Services Richard Meeks explained in a previous interview.
Imaging in the new surgical suites will be completely high definition, which will produce better image quality and ease image comparison, Meeks said. The existing surgical suites will also be upgraded.
The spinal room will be decked out like the surgical suites in any teaching hospital across the nation so medical students can observe surgeries, Meeks said.
“We’re setting him (Dr. Juris Shybama) to do some outstanding teaching,” Meeks said.
The community will benefit in the future from these state-of-the-art improvements and the increased access to existing services created by the expansion, Heatherly explained.
Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com.
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