Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 2, 1994 TAG: 9408020083
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PEARISBURG LENGTH: Long
With every new brick, every stroke of fresh paint, Giles County's peace of mind is expanding.
To an outsider, the construction project looks like any hospital renovation: a new X-ray room here, a bigger emergency room there, a layer of plaster dust over everything.
But to Giles County residents, the expansion of Giles Memorial Hospital means this rural, mountainous county can worry just that much less about the availability of medical care.
"That's one of the scary parts of living in a rural community," said Lori Kauffelt, director of public relations for the hospital. "What if my kid gets sick? What if I get sick?
"It's reassuring for them to know that access to medical care starts here."
Since the early 1950s, the staff at Giles Memorial has been setting the broken bones and suturing the wounds for residents of Pearisburg and the other towns and surrounding rural areas in the county, population 16,500.
Since last week, they've been treating those folks in a renovated emergency department so new it still smells of paint and sawdust.
With the first phase of the construction project complete, the 5,500-square-foot emergency department houses a mammography suite, an X-ray room, a waiting area and a decontamination room.
The second phase of the expansion, scheduled to be completed in early winter, will include renovation of the radiology department, expansion of the parking lot and, as the centerpiece, purchase of a $450,000 computerized tomography - or CT - scanner.
Currently, Giles Memorial and Franklin Memorial hospitals share a portable CT scanner, an X-ray-like machine that produces images of internal organs.
While such an expenditure may seem high for a 65-bed hospital on a $12 million operating budget, Kauffelt said patient demand has made an in-house scanner a necessity for most hospitals. Sharing a portable unit with Franklin Memorial has meant that critically ill patients have had to be transferred to Franklin for scans, which has wasted valuable treatment time. The new scanner also will be of a higher quality than the portable one, she said.
The decision to expand the emergency department was made several years ago to cope with an increasing patient load, Kauffelt said.
"The demand for an emergency department was so great we felt we needed to expand to better serve the community," she said.
About 8,000 patients are seen in the emergency department each year, with a doctor on hand 24 hours a day, said hospital administrator Morris Reese.
Other New River Valley hospitals also have remodeled recently. In 1992, Montgomery Regional Hospital opened its newly expanded and renovated emergency room. Pulaski Community Hospital is moving offices, expanding nursing stations and starting an out-patient physical therapy unit in Dublin. Radford Community Hospital renovated its emergency room last year and also has plans to begin building a new hospital nearer Interstate 81 within the next two years.
Nearby Wythe County Community Hospital has applied for a certificate of public need for an expansion and renovation. So far, the hospital has received conditional approval for the design phase.
Giles' expansion began some three years ago with a fund-raising campaign that drew on governments, businesses and individuals. The community drive raised $830,000, enough to pay for phase one of the renovation. Phase two, including the scanner, will cost about $815,000 and will be paid for through a bond issue by the Carilion Health System, a regional network of hospitals that owns Giles Memorial.
The expansion reflects the changing character of small, rural hospitals, said Lester Lamb, an executive vice president of Carilion and president of Radford Community Hospital, which also belongs to the Carilion network.
According to Lamb, small hospitals like Giles are providing more outpatient services and moving away from inpatient treatments that can be performed more cheaply by larger facilities.
Giles continues to perform general surgeries like appendectomies and hysterectomies on a regular basis and has two surgeons on its staff of 15 physicians. But technological advances such as microscopic surgery now allow the hospital to offer many services on an outpatient basis, Kauffelt said.
With its ties to Carilion, Giles Memorial also fits another statewide trend: affiliation with larger hospitals or health care networks.
"The outlook for rural as well as for all hospitals is toward forming alliances and partnerships with other hospitals," said Peggy Cooning, vice president of communications for the Virginia Hospital Association. "The future is networks."
Giles Memorial became associated with Carilion in 1980, when the health care network began providing management for the hospital. In 1988, facing mounting budget pressures, the Giles Memorial board opted to come under complete Carilion ownership, Reese said.
Since then, the ties between Giles Memorial and the other Carilion facilities have become even closer, Reese said. About 18 patients a month - 2 percent to 3 percent of all emergency cases - are transferred to Roanoke hospitals. Numerous others are sent to other Carilion hospitals, including Radford.
The partnership also has brought the Roanoke medical centers much closer to the people of Giles County through Lifeguard-10, a helicopter transport service that reduces the 90-minute drive to Roanoke to a 19-minute flight - often a lifesaving time difference.
There are monetary advantages to belonging to a network like Carilion as well. Thanks to the economy of scale of such a large network, member hospitals are able to purchase equipment and supplies sometimes out of reach of small, unaffiliated facilities. And expansion projects like the one at Giles are made possible in part through Carilion contributions.
But even with their alliance with a larger hospital group, the new emergency department could never have been built without the overwhelming support of the community, Reese said.
"We're not a young county, particularly; we're not a wealthy county, particularly," Reese said. "For a community this size to have a hospital is pretty unusual. Community participation has been key."
by CNB