Salem Hospital Adds Seven Floors
It’s out with the old, in with the new at Salem Hospital.
On May 15, 2009, the long-standing medical center opened a brand new, seven-story patient care tower on its existing Winter Street campus. The $285 million building addition is part of an overall plan that will ultimately replace the existing hospital building that was constructed in 1953.
“The expected life of a hospital building is about 50 years, because as the building gets older and new technology is discovered, the new technology is brought in but the old hospital rooms get smaller and more crowded,” says Julie Howard, Salem Hospital spokesperson. “That was the whole reason why we wanted to build this critical care tower. We wanted our most technology-intensive services located there.”
For now, the old hospital building will be remodeled to make it more comfortable, and services that are less technical will remain in that setting.
“Our goal is to eventually keep adding to the new patient tower, then move out of the old building once overall construction to the new facility is complete,” Howard says. “The old building has served the community well over the years, but advancements in medicine made it vital to modernize our patient facilities – and now we have.”
The seven-floor tower features an all-new emergency department and an imaging center on the first floor, while the second floor is devoted to surgery. The third and fourth floors are earmarked for support services and priority labs, while the top three floors are devoted entirely to inpatient care.
“The fifth floor itself is solely for cardiovascular patients, and HealthGrades has just rated Salem Hospital No. 1 in the entire state of Oregon for overall heart services and heart surgery,” Howard says. “A nice point about the fifth floor is that cardiovascular patients can stay in their same room during the entire recovery process. Most hospital cardiovascular rooms are either for critical care or intensive care patients, but the patients at Salem Hospital remain in the same room no matter what their condition. We just simply remove equipment as the patient gets better.”
The new tower also features sky bridges that connect it with other buildings on the hospital campus, so that people can walk between buildings without experiencing street traffic. Other amenities in the patient care tower include a satellite pharmacy, meditation room, respiration therapy area and a neurosurgery center.
“Salem Hospital still has the same amount of overall patient beds [454], but we have gained more critical care beds that we’ve needed for quite a long time,” Howard says. “We remain the largest employer in Salem and the only hospital in the city, and continue to be as technologically advanced as we have always been.”
