Outside looks good, but lots of work remains inside Everett hospital

Published 10:27 pm Sunday, May 16, 2010

EVERETT — With the recent addition of its shiny glass exterior, the 12-story, $500 million medical tower now under construction in north Everett dominates the city’s skyline and can be spotted from as far away as Whidbey Island.

Yet much remains to be done before its opening next summer. Nearly 600 workers are assigned to projects from its top to bottom floors. These include work on a new, larger helipad for speeding trauma patients to the hospital and the drilling, wiring and hammering now under way throughout the building’s interior.

With the increasingly finished look of the building’s exterior, people sometimes ask why it isn’t ready to open, said Mark Baughman, who oversees the construction project for M.A. Mortenson Co. “There’s nearly 700,000 square feet of space. There’s lots to do.”

The U-shaped building, adjacent to Providence Regional Medical Center Everett’s current hospital at 1321 Colby Ave., will provide upgraded services and room for growth. Portions of the current hospital date back to the 1960s.

The hospital’s emergency room, already one of the state’s busiest, will be able to treat 150,000 patients a year in its new quarters in the medical tower’s ground floor.

Anyone who has experienced the hospital’s current cramped emergency room, with 260 employees, will be hard put to imagine the spaciousness of the new 55,870-square-foot emergency department, an area equivalent to three National Hockey League ice rinks.

“It’s been pretty crowded for a while,” said Julie Zarn, director of the hospital’s emergency and trauma services. “We’ve done these minor additions, three times in the 15 years I’ve been here.”

Employees who saw mock-ups of the new emergency room are still surprised when touring the new space, she said.

“When you go in, you can really appreciate how big it is… It’s kind of got a large ‘Wow!’ factor,” she said.

Because the hospital will continue to treat patients even as it moves into its new quarters, the medical tower will open in stages, with the emergency room expected to open first in the summer of 2011.

Its 79 private treatment rooms will have clinical gear and equipment on one side and designated space for family members on the other side so they won’t “feel like they were just wedging in,” Zarn said.

Patients who now experience an average three-hour delay from the time they arrive to when they leave, will see that time decline as staff get used to their new quarters, Zarn said. “I think we can get much better.”

The building will have 372 in-patient rooms, each with pull out couches for family members.

It will have a variety of high-tech diagnostic and imaging equipment. “We figured we would get some new equipment, but basically we have gotten new everything,” said Dr. Virginia Eschbach, medical director of diagnostic imaging.

New high definition CT scanners will provide far more diagnostic information than currently available.

As one example, it will be able to tell the composition of a kidney stone. Those clues can tell physicians whether the patient will respond to changes in diet, she said.

The scanners will be able to create thousands of images in one “pass” over the patient, Eschbach said, providing information on possible brain, spine, chest and abdomen, arm and leg injuries of trauma patients about four times faster than current machines.

MRI machines, which also produce diagnostic images, will, in addition to being about twice as powerful, have a bigger bore, or opening, to place patients.

“The wider bore will make them feel less claustrophobic,” she said.

X-ray machines will be smaller and lighter, Eschbach she said. “They don’t look as threatening as that big, heavy X-ray equipment.”

The building is the biggest financial investment ever made at one site by the hospital’s parent organization, Providence Health &Services, said Tom Gaffney, chairman of the Everett hospital’s board.

Gaffney first began serving on the board in 1994, the year the city’s two former independent hospitals, General and Providence, merged.

Gaffney, who grew up just blocks from the former General Hospital, said the new medical tower is just one of several major developments since the merger. He points to the Pavilion for Women and Children, which opened in 2002, and the Providence Regional Cancer Partnership, which opened in 2007.

“If you look at what we’re doing today. … it’s grown into more than just a community hospital,” Gaffney said. “We’ve really become a regional medical center.”

Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486; salyer@heraldnet.com.

New tower

Providence Regional Medical Center Everett’s 12-story, $500 million medical tower will open in stages beginning summer 2011. The first department to open will be the emergency room. Here are some details: