Hospitals grow with valley's needs
Over the past week, the Daily Inter Lake has featured front-page stories on both of Flathead County's hospitals. Not surprisingly, the focus was growth.
North Valley Hospital in Whitefish is putting the finishing touches on a 82,352-square-foot alpine-style facility at a new campus a mile south of Whitefish. Its scheduled opening on March 22 caps a five-year effort that was controversial during the site selection.
While some questioned the need for a bigger and better Whitefish hospital at first, it's obvious now that the North Valley board of directors and administrators did their homework as they moved forward with a hospital that's much bigger than the old one and has room for future expansion. They made a wise choice in positioning the new campus in a high-growth area of Whitefish, even when naysayers said it should remain close to the downtown area. And in the end, the community rallied around the project with the support it deserved.
IT SEEMS like just yesterday Kalispell Regional Medical Center was wrapping up construction of its new patient tower, and now we learn the medical center is already considering new expansion to serve the growing valley and a graying population.
As Kalispell Regional spokesman Jim Oliverson put it: "It's a good problem to have."
Hospital officials now know that studies completed about nine years ago for the expansion completed in 2003 underestimated growth and patient loads. Statistics from the summer months of 2006 revealed the hospital simply doesn't have enough beds. Occupancy of the medical center's 68 acute-care beds reached a high of 85 per day in September as a result of the steady stream of patients.
Predicting the future of any industry is always a calculated guess, and health care is no exception. Hospital officials now have embarked on another round of research to get a handle on what health-care needs will be in the Flathead 15 to 20 years from now.
Knowing it will take at least three years to break ground on further expansion, Kalispell Regional already has a plan to accommodate the growth in the interim. A prefabricated nursing unit will be added in June to boost the number of beds.
THE EXPANSION of the Flathead's hospitals follows a national health-care building boom brought on by aging baby boomers. A 2004 Hospitals & Health Networks survey showed that 60 percent of hospitals need to replace aging facilities. Driving a surge in new construction are the need to keep pace with consumer demands for privacy and family-centered care and the need for improved operational efficiency and patient flow.
As Flathead Valley residents, we've always prided ourselves on having health-care facilities and professionals that are second to none. Our hospital leaders should be commended for having the foresight and taking the initiative to assure we'll continue to grow as a regional center for health care.