Bellwater General Health System broke ground Tuesday on a new intensive care wing, a $46 million project that will add 24 beds and replace a unit hospital officials say was built for a hospital half its current size.
Bellwater General Health System broke ground Tuesday on a new intensive care wing at its downtown flagship campus, a $46 million project hospital officials say will add 24 ICU beds and replace an aging unit that chief executive Dr. Angela Whitcombe said was never designed for the volume of critical care the hospital now handles. The project is separate from the behavioral health wing the system opened earlier this year, part of what Whitcombe described as the most active stretch of capital investment in the hospital’s recent history.
“Our current ICU was built for a hospital half our size,” Whitcombe said at Tuesday’s groundbreaking. “We’ve added specialists, added equipment, and added patients over the years, but the physical footprint never caught up. This is us finally catching up.”
An aging unit reaches its limits
Dr. Felix Ortega, the hospital system’s chief of surgery, said the current 16-bed ICU regularly operates at or above capacity, forcing the hospital to board critical patients in post-anesthesia recovery bays or, in rare cases, transfer them to facilities outside the county when no bed is available. “We’ve had nights where every single bed is full and we’re making decisions about who needs it most urgently rather than simply admitting whoever needs it,” Ortega said. “That’s not a decision any hospital wants to be making regularly.”
Ortega said the new wing’s 24 beds, an increase of eight over the current unit, were sized based on a capacity study the hospital commissioned two years ago that modeled projected demand against the region’s aging population and growth trends. He said the study also factored in the hospital’s expanding behavioral-health and addiction-medicine caseload, since a growing share of ICU admissions now involve patients with complications tied to long-term substance use.
Our current ICU was built for a hospital half our size. We’ve added specialists, added equipment, and added patients over the years, but the physical footprint never caught up. This is us finally catching up.
Dr. Angela Whitcombe, Chief Executive, Bellwater General Health System
Funding and financing
Whitcombe said the $46 million project is funded primarily through hospital system bonds, supplemented by a philanthropic campaign that has raised roughly $9 million toward the total so far. She said the system expects to close the remaining funding gap through additional donor commitments before construction is scheduled to finish, though she declined to specify a contingency plan if fundraising falls short.
City Manager Marcus Whitfield, who attended the groundbreaking on behalf of the mayor’s office, said the city expedited permitting for the project given its public-health significance. “This isn’t the kind of project where we want bureaucracy to be the bottleneck,” Whitfield said. “A hospital’s capital timeline and a city’s permitting calendar don’t always move at the same speed, and we tried to close that gap here.”
A downtown council member’s interest
Council Member Patricia Yoon, who represents the Downtown Core district where the hospital’s flagship campus sits, said she has heard from constituents concerned about construction noise and parking disruption during the roughly 20-month build. “I don’t want to minimize that this is going to be an inconvenience for people living and working nearby,” Yoon said. “But I also don’t think anyone in this district wants to be the person who complained about parking while the hospital was trying to add ICU capacity.”
Yoon said she has asked the hospital to commit to a community liaison for construction-related complaints, a request Whitcombe said the system has agreed to establish before major construction work begins next month.
Staffing the new beds
Ortega said the hospital plans to hire roughly 30 additional ICU nurses and support staff over the two years construction is expected to take, a target he acknowledged will be difficult given a nationwide shortage of critical-care nurses that has affected hospitals of every size. “We’re not building empty beds,” Ortega said. “But I won’t pretend the staffing side of this is a solved problem just because we’ve solved the funding and the blueprint.”
Whitcombe said the hospital is expanding a nurse residency program aimed at training staff internally for ICU-level care rather than relying solely on external hires, a strategy she said the system also used ahead of opening its behavioral health wing earlier this year. “We learned from that experience that you can’t wait until a building is finished to start building your workforce,” she said. “We’re starting that process now, twenty months before a single bed is ready.”
Construction is expected to conclude in roughly 20 months, with the new wing scheduled to begin accepting patients on a phased basis as staffing allows. Whitcombe said the hospital will maintain its current ICU capacity throughout construction, with no planned reduction in critical-care beds during the build.