ARLINGTON – Pushed by the growth in the number of people seeking its services, Cascade Valley Hospital may seek voter approval of a bond issue within the next two years to double the hospital’s current space.
“It’s become obvious that at some point in the near future we’ll need a major facility expansion,” said Clark Jones, chief executive of the public hospital.
Preliminary plans call for adding a second building about the same size as the current hospital, which opened in 1988 and has 42,000 square feet.
It’s too early to know the exact amount of the bond issue voters would be asked to approve, but it could range between $20 million and $25 million, Jones said.
“We’re experiencing significant space problems in our building because our patient volumes have grown so much,” Jones said.
The biggest areas of growth are in the diagnostic imaging and outpatient cancer treatment units as well as the emergency room.
Between 1996 and 2004, the number of outpatients nearly doubled, with 31,600 people treated without an overnight stay at the hospital last year. Emergency room visits have doubled as well, from 9,336 in 1996 to 18,936 last year.
“That’s what’s driving our facility problems,” Jones said. “We have a building built in 1987. We’ve had significant (patient) increases since then.”
For hospital space to increase, an older building currently on the hospital site would be demolished. The proposed new building would be connected to the current hospital building with a walkway, he said.
The new building would provide more space for current services, he said, and could be home to imaging and laboratory services, outpatient cancer treatment and surgical services.
The expansion could fill the hospital’s space needs for up to a decade, he said.
Cascade Valley and its seven affiliated medical clinics ended last year with a net profit of 1.8 percent or $675,650, Jones said.
The 48-bed hospital has 430 full- and part-time employees.
Since 2000, when it was losing about $100,000 a month, the hospital has regained financial stability, and has made a profit every year since then, Jones said.
In 2000, voters approved an increase in the hospital levy which provides about a $1 million each year to the publicly supported hospital.
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