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Hospital breaks ground

By MARK SAGE/Staff
It was fitting that Martha Bryan, a 34-year obstetrics nurse at Johnston Memorial Hospital would wind up the ground-breaking speeches.
She spends her days with families welcoming new life into the world. On Thursday, she was with around 500 people in a field ringed by wildflowers, welcoming a new life into the community.
Bryan pointed out that more than 100 years of planning went into designing the planned 251,000-square-foot hospital. She said employees were solicited for ideas that made it to the final phase, making the upcoming building a hospital created by the workers for the larger community.
Sean McMurray, Johnston Memorial’s chief executive officer, said the replacement hospital is dedicated to the people who work at JMH. The $135 million project, he said, would be a “better stage for these stars to perform on.”
That stage will feature a larger emergency room and a more comfortable environment “more conducive to healing and wellness,” he said. Though the emergency department will have more rooms, the bigger hospital will actually have fewer beds than the current one on Court Street in Abingdon’s downtown. Plans call for a 120-bed facility off U.S. Highway 11, compared to the current 135 beds. However, all 120 beds will be in private rooms. McMurray said earlier that around 60 percent of the rooms now are only semi-private with some patients sharing space.
Pointing to the hospital’s long “history deeply woven into the fabric of our community,” – JMH got started in a 12-bed log cabin before expanding slightly and moving to its current spot off Valley Street in 1905 – McMurray said it’s time to relocate, to that flat spot atop a hill overlooking Interstate 81.
The new facility, which will be built beside the cancer center that opened in April 2007, will be the first green hospital in Southwest Virginia, McMurray said. That means it will be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environment Design) certified, a third-party program that looks at sustainability in site development, water savings, energy efficiency, material selection and indoor environmental quality. The ratings systems to award certification, according to the U.S. Green Building Council, are developed through “consensus-based” volunteer committees. Some of the things that will help the facility achieve green certification are a planned atrium, and the boundary of native-plant landscaping already taking root.
In neighboring Tennessee, Mountain States Health Alliance is busy making Franklin Woods Community Hospital, now under construction in Johnson City’s Med Tech Park, a green facility. Both hospitals are expected to be complete by 2010.
In March, Johnston Memorial announced that it would merge with Mountain States in a deal that gave the Johnson City-based nonprofit 50.1 percent control. At that time, Otey Dudley, vice president of Johnston Memorial’s Board of Trustees, said the merger would help JMH fulfill its mission and help with the ongoing plans to build between Interstate 81’s exits 19 and 22.
At the groundbreaking on Thursday, Board president Tom Fowlkes said the group had struggled over whether to remain independent and whether to remain in the comfort zone carved out for 100 years in downtown Abingdon. In the end, of course, the board decided to partner and build a new facility. It was, he said, the only decision to make, calling this hospital campus the most ambitious construction project in the history of the county.
On top of the estimated construction cost, JMH paid around $2 million for the 60 acres off Highway 11. Earlier McMurray said the hospital would be transferring as much property, everything from beds to expensive imaging equipment as possible, thus saving some money.
Chief Medical Officer Dr. Douglas Lawler said the money spent is pledge to the generations of the future. Investing in a new facility reveals, he said, that JMH is a community. He likened the new hospital to a time machine. When it’s built, he said, you can gaze out the windows into the world of your great-great-grandchildren. That future generation, he said, will one day imagine what the field ringed with flowers looked like without a hospital and wonder what we were thinking as we built.
“Them,” he said.