Washington Regional Receiving Big Facelift

Washington Regional Medical Center’s $90 million campus is receiving a $60 million facelift.
An increase in inpatient demand has forced WRMC to expand only four years after opening its facility on North Hills Boulevard in Fayetteville.
Demand has been so high that the hospital’s 233 beds were full on about 20 percent of the days last year. When that happens, WRMC goes into diversion mode, meaning patients are diverted to other hospitals.
New construction should alleviate those problems for now. There are actually four projects in the works for Phase I, with the biggest the addition of a fifth floor on top of the existing hospital.
“It just became evident to us that there was a consistent demand and it wasn’t going to stop increasing, so we needed to go ahead and add to our capacity,” said Tami Hutchison, the senior vice president of business development and planning at WRMC.
Plenty of forward thinking was involved when the hospital broke ground in 1999 as the facility was engineered — as far as wiring, plumbing, etc. — with the ability to add another floor when needed.
Of course, no one anticipated the need coming so soon after it opened in August of 2002. But the addition will make 72 more beds available, increasing the hospital’s capacity by more than 30 percent.
“We’ve done our volume projections and everybody has their own crystal ball,” Hutchison said. “But we should be set for some number of years, and probably at the most, 10 years.”
The emergency department will nearly double in size with most of the expansion coming in the trauma section. Hutchison said WRMC’s emergency department is the busiest in the state, treating 50,000 people per year. The expansion will give it the ability to see 70,000 people per year.
Other Phase I projects include construction of a 40,000-SF senior health and wellness center and a new administration building.
While the senior health and wellness center will allow Washington Regional to move its senior health clinic operations to that location, the administration building may be the most cost-effective.
Now, most of WRMC’s support functions — such as human resources, accounting, marketing and some warehouse services — are located on the corner of North College Avenue and North Street in Fayetteville, where Washington Regional first opened as Washington County Hospital in 1950 with 50 beds.
“The estimated savings that we will experience is about $1 million a year in operating expenses,” Hutchison said. “On a daily basis, we are transporting food and supplies from North College, so this will save us a lot of time and money.”
Phase II includes “a few smaller, but critical” projects, such as the addition of an education center and a therapeutic center, and should cost less than $5 million.
Baldwin and Shell is the general contractor for the projects. Some of Phase I will begin to come online late next year, but the completion date for the all of the projects is set for early spring of 2008.