Hospital expansion is far from over

COEUR d’ALENE — The dust will hardly have settled around Kootenai Health’s $57 million hospital expansion when the next phase gets started.

A $45.2 million project for the emergency department, operating rooms and related support departments was approved Tuesday afternoon by Kootenai Hospital District’s board of trustees. Construction on Phase 2 will begin next month, just weeks after Phase 1’s March 15 opening.

It’s all going according to plan.

“Back in 2013 we put the pieces in place and called it the master facility plan,” said Liese Razzeto, the board’s chair. “The east expansion was Phase 1. We knew that there would be more phases, and we truly knew that in order to do those phases we had to free up space. That’s why Phase 1 went first.”

Jeremy Evans, who is overseeing by far the largest expansion in the hospital’s history, said there’s actually very little guesswork in the construction itself.

“It’s always been choreographed from the beginning,” Evans said. “We knew we were going to roll right from one [phase] to the next. We’ve choreographed this practically to the day.”

When Phase 2 is done in autumn 2018, Kootenai Health will have more room to treat emergencies, more and bigger operating rooms, and more of the support departments that will be needed to accommodate all those additional patients, officials said.

According to CEO Jon Ness, the emergency department was originally built to handle 32,000 visits a year but saw more than 50,000 patients last year.

“That can’t be a good experience for our patients,” Razzeto said.

The new department will be able to accommodate 55,000 to 57,000 visits a year, and construction will be done in phases so 25 rooms will always be available for patient care. When it’s completed, the hospital will add 11 new treatment rooms for a total of 36 emergency department rooms.

One of the features of the new ER will be several rooms designed to keep behavioral health patients safe, hospital officials said. There will also be a newly designed ambulance drop-off area on the south side of the hospital to make it easier for first responders to bring in patients.

The operating department construction will also be handled in phases so plenty of operating rooms are available. All the current operating rooms will be expanded, updated and redesigned to improve workflow, and three more operating rooms will be added. When construction is done, Kootenai Health will have 11 operating suites and the department will grow from 17,350 square feet to 33,450 square feet.

Ness said Phase 2 will be financed without debt. Hospital reserves and philanthropy will foot the bill, he said. Phase 1 was paid for by cash reserves, philanthropy and debt.

Because the not-for-profit hospital is community owned, the board has the authority to tax property owners at any time. Since 1995 it’s never done so and, Ness said, has no plans to now.

“Our board is steadfast in our commitment not to use our taxing authority and remains committed to that goal,” he said. “We want to have the least amount of debt we can possibly have and still proceed with these projects.”

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Over the span of more than two years of construction on Phase 2 of Kootenai Health’s hospital expansion, 500 to 600 construction workers will be needed, although not all at the same time. Construction payroll is estimated between $10 million and $12 million.

Expansion is also expected to create 100 to 150 new staff positions at the hospital by 2018. Kootenai Health now employs 2,776.