City pleased with progress on new hospital

Plans for the new hospital are going so smoothly that city officials consider it something to brag about.

"I just think you need to be out there tooting your horn a little bit," Sidney Mayor Wendall Gaston told hospital CEO Jason Petik during Tuesday night's City Council meeting. "This is a pretty impressive looking facility."

Still, while the initial design process for the medical center is already complete, architects and hospital officials are ironing out some kinks and are open to changes.

"I know we are still working on some concepts and some plans about accessing that land in the back east portion where there's the possibility of a park area," Sidney Regional Medical Center's Petik told council.

There are a few other additional issues to confront.

"We also know there's some storm sewer drainage that we need to address, as well," Petik said. "We are still very actively working on those situations."

The medical center will be interviewing four potential contractors July 29.

Center officials received bids from these contractors on Tuesday afternoon and are still reviewing the numbers, Petik said.

"It's gonna be interesting to see how sharp the contractors can get their pencils," Petik said.

Petik and his team plan to rank the contractors after interviews next Monday and to work with the top ranked contractor. SRMC will ask the contractor to go over guarantee numbers and the initial guaranteed maximum with the architect and Project One and hope to come back from that with a price tag that fits in the budget. Petik wants to choose a contractor by the end of August.

Scott Bustos of Project One informed the council that the construction will tentatively take 18 to 20 months. Work on the new building is slated to start in May 2014.

The hospital already has a tentative construction schedule, but will need to go over it in detail with the contractors, while keeping the budget in mind to make certain it's plausible. An additional eight weeks is set aside after construction to make the move from the old facility to the new one.

"Are you planning on having some public meetings?" asked Sidney Mayor Wendall Gaston. "I think there are two less beds in this hospital, but there are a huge number of other things that don't currently exist that I think are real assets to the whole project."

Petik confirmed that SRMC would be holding public meetings at some point and plans to send a monthly update on hospital progress to the city council.

"We're actually at the point where we have something we can show people and feel proud about bringing this product forward," Petik said.

He touted more room in many areas that the hospital is currently lacking, such as outpatient rehabilitation and outpatients surgeries.

"The outpatient therapy area is almost double what we did three years ago," Petik said.

The new facility will take Sidney from two operating rooms and a single procedure room to three operating rooms and three procedure rooms. It will also expand post and pre operative rooms from nine to 13 and will feature an expanded specialty clinic, something that Petik said the SRMC sorely needs.

Both Petik and Gaston lamented the fact that people are upset that there are two fewer beds in the new hospital when all the new features make this facility far superior.

The new SRMC building will feature three exam rooms for each of the six family practice physicians working in the center.

"All the physicians gave up their offices," Petik said. "They were adamant that they wanted space for patients and they didn't need any office anymore. That was a tradition that they didn't feel they needed to maintain."

The new facility will be much easier to navigate than the old one.

"I think it'll be a much more effective and efficient flow for the patients as well," Petik said.

SRMC plans to recognize donors who've helped make the new center possible somewhere in the new facility, while making sure they remember those who made the original SRMC possible in the past.

"The vision that they had 15 or 20 years ago is the one we keep on moving forward with today," Petik said.

The Mayor seemed pleased with the updates and encouraged Petik to get more information out to the public.

Gaston mentioned the possibility of the city supplying dual power to the hospital from two directions, in case one side goes out, to limit the need to use a backup generator.

"I think it meets a lot more of our healthcare needs that we have here today, by a long ways," Gaston said.