New $11 million project to tap growing demand for women’s health care services

An addition that will more than double the capacity of Mountain West Medical Center’s women’s services is finally on its way to becoming a reality.

A ceremonial groundbreaking for the new multimillion-dollar women’s center, which was originally announced by hospital officials back in 2007, will be held tomorrow. Mountain West Medical Center CEO Kelly Duffin said the addition is largely a response to growth in the community.

“This is in response to a community need,” Duffin said. “Twenty-eight percent of the time this past year we were at or above capacity for women’s services. We need to respond to that growing demand in a manner that meets the healthcare needs of the Tooele Valley.”

The roughly 16,000-square-foot women’s center will be built attached to the northwest of the hospital. It will have its own private entrance with walkways that connect it to the main building.

Duffin said the women’s center will contain eight labor and delivery rooms, compared to the three the hospital has now. The expansion will also add five post-partum rooms compared to the four currently at the hospital, and will include a separate C-section room for that procedure as well as gynecological surgeries.

The project will cost $11 million, which includes equipment and expanding the hospital’s surgical services as well.

The expanded surgical area will consist of converting the existing labor and delivery area into two endoscopy rooms and eight pre-procedure rooms. In addition, an existing endoscopy room will be converted into a fourth operating room.

“Clearly we’re at capacity,” Duffin said. “You can talk to any of our physicians and surgeons and they will tell you on any given day we are so full ... [This project] is really a response to that — to make the workflow better for the physician and for the patient.”

The expansion will be done in three phases, the first of which will be the women’s center. Construction of that phase is scheduled to take about nine months. The second phase will be the changing of the existing labor and delivery area into the endoscopy rooms and pre-procedure rooms, which will take four months. The third phase — converting an existing endoscopy room into the fourth operating room — will take about two months.

“It’s not just bricks and mortar,” Duffin said. “It’s new technologies that we believe will further elevate the quality of care people can receive right here in Tooele.”

For instance, in the surgical suite, the hospital will be able to provide a service called the anterior approach to hip replacement, which is a much less invasive way for doing hip replacement. Duffin said this procedure, which only a few hospitals in Utah are offering, will decrease a patient’s recovery time from two weeks to just days.

Also, he said the expansion will mean endoscopy and laparoscopy procedures will be done in high-definition.

“Tooele’s surgeons will be able to provide additional cutting-edge services using high-definition laser technologies and minimally invasive surgical techniques that are normally found only in much larger hospitals,” Duffin said.

The new physical expansion mirrors the hospital’s growth in other services.

For example, MWMC has recently been added to the National Disaster Medical System, a network of hospitals that serves as a first line of response for treating patients in case of a national or regional emergency. There are 24 other NDMS hospitals statewide — roughly half the hospitals in the state.

“It’s a good designation and we’re ready and able to provide for that at a moment’s notice,” Duffin said.

Despite continued patient demand, however, Duffin said the hospital has not been immune from the effects of the recession.

“We have experienced a slight decline in elective surgeries,” he said. “People who are selective with how they spend their money are using it in different ways. But for the general hospitalized patient — the patient with pneumonia or with sepsis or any number of disease types — volume has gone up. And in a real sense that is the indicator of general health and strength of a hospital organization: whether the total population will support and sustain that growth.”

Duffin has been CEO of the hospital since April 2008. He said the primary challenge of his job has been fitting services to community needs.

“It has to be a good fit — meaning we are listening to the community and we want the community to convey what those needs are,” he said.

He added MWMC has been very fortunate in the staffing arena.

“We’re a small enough hospital that we’ve been able to get a sufficient number of nurses, CNAs and LPNs that we need,” he said. “We are still recruiting more, but we’ve not had the extreme shortages that other areas of the country perhaps have seen.”

Sarah Miley: swest@tooeletranscript.com