Published: November 03, 2009 11:33 pm      

Public invited to tour new medical center

CUMBERLAND — In anticipation of the Nov. 21 opening of the Western Maryland Regional Medical Center, the public is invited to participate in the ribbon-cutting ceremony and tour the new Willowbrook Road hospital on Sunday. The ceremony will take place at 1 p.m. and the public open house will be from 2 to 6 p.m. and include tours of the emergency department, cancer center, labor and delivery unit and an acute care unit.

“We are within sight of a culmination of a dream, and that dream will affect literally hundreds of thousands of people a year,” Karen Johnson, Western Maryland Health System Foundation executive director, told Rotary members at their Tuesday meeting at the Holiday Inn.

Planning for the 585,000-square-foot facility began in November 2004, with the groundbreaking taking place in October 2006. Johnson said there are many challenges to building a state-of-the-art, clinically excellent, patient-accommodating, warm and inviting health care facility, but the new hospital has been completed on time and under budget.

“The new hospital was designed with patients and visitors in mind,” she said. “It really is a sleek-looking facility with state-of-the-art technology, but warmth and comfort for the patients and their family.”

The medical center includes a 955-space parking garage and a new 120,000-square-foot medical arts center, which will be 70-percent full at the opening of the hospital, and will include some of the health system’s outpatient services such as dialysis, behaviorial health, pain management and physician offices.

“Our latest venture is an outpatient diagnostic center which is in the current WMHS Administrative Center,” Johnson said. “And that will include general radiology, ultrasounds, bone density, CT scan lab and EKG ... that was just added recently and will also open when we open the new hospital.”

She said there are some other features on the new campus that, if she were a first-time comer to the hospital, she would like to know such as free valet parking at the main entrance on weekdays.

“I’d like to know there are nursing work stations set up directly outside patient rooms,” she said. “And how this affects you and your family is that for every two patient rooms there are small windows with blinds in them and a nurse could look in this room and look in this room by opening the blinds and not going in and bothering the patient.”

Nurses will also be carrying Ascom phones so when patients push the call button, the call will go directly to the nurses instead of to the nurses’ station.

Other additions that help to enhance the hospital include two kiosks inside the lobby, one to help in way-finding and the other which gives a list of all who have donated to the health system, a healing garden outside the chapel/reflection area, wireless Internet and 24-hour food service.

“There are also 11 elevators,” Johnson said. “Three will be used for patient transport, three for visitors, three for employees and two that are service elevators.”

She said health system officials hope the community will come out for the ribbon-cutting ceremony and tour the new facility.

For more information about the Western Maryland Regional Medical Center, visit www.WMHS.com.

Contact Tess Hill at thill@times-news.com.