WVU Medicine extends commitment further in Mercer County with $25M emergency and behavior health facility
bluefield – Officials broke ground Thursday for a new $25 million health care campus that will serve behavioral health and emergency medical needs across a 10-county region encompassing parts of West Virginia and Virginia.
Supporters gathered outside the Behavioral Health Pavilion of the Virginias off Route 460 in Bluefield for the ceremony which marks the start of the site's transformation.
'It's a great event today and I'm super excited to talk about our $25 million project,' Princeton Community Hospital president and CEO Karen Bowling said.
'I think it's important for us to acknowledge how we got here today and how this project came about,' she said. 'It is important for us to invest in Mercer County. There's a great need here and we are so fortunate to have a great board of directors who have vision and saw the need for this project, but more importantly we have a great system board. And Albert Wright, who leads that system board, they were able to believe in us and know this is a great investment in Mercer County.'
Bowling said the Bluefield and Bluefield, Va. area is important to the hospital.
'And it's not just about the location, but really it is to express to the Bluefield community that we're invested in state-of-the-art health care in this part of Mercer County,' she said. 'We believe that's key for everyone to know and understand we are here to serve a 10-county region and this part of the county actually borders on several counties that we serve; and we want to make sure as we think about comprehensive care across our region that we're able to do that through the types of projects you're about to see.'
Scheduled to be completed in late 2027, the Bluefield Campus project includes a 24,000-square-foot addition and an 18,000-square-foot renovation to the existing facility now housing Princeton Community's 64-bed behavioral health hospital. In this project, the expansion will consolidate Princeton Community Hospital's services into a single facility that will be visible from Route 460, one of Mercer County's main highways.
The hospital's behavioral health facility serves patients not only from Mercer County, but also the West Virginia counties of Raleigh, McDowell, Monroe, Summers and Wyoming as well as the Southwest Virginia counties of Tazewell, Bland, Giles and Wythe. While the facility is currently called the Behavioral Health Pavilion of the Virginias, it's getting a new name.
'I'm very excited to announce that our new name for our behavioral health service is WVU Medicine PCH Behavioral Health Center,' Bowling said.
The campus's new emergency department will include 20 exam rooms, including two rooms designed for psychiatric intake; two resuscitation rooms and two triage rooms; obstetrics-ready and trauma rooms; centralized care team support stations; and dedicated patient and ambulance entrances.
Adjacent to the emergency department, there will be a new 10-bed observation unit providing flexible capabilities for extended monitoring, Bowling said. Each observation room will include an in-room bathroom, and the unit will feature an Individual of Size room to ensure inclusive care.
Bowling also described features for outpatient and diagnostic services, including lab services for both walk-in and inpatient care as well as respiratory therapy services. The facility's imaging suite will have diagnostic radiology; a computed tomography scanner; a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and two ultrasound rooms. The MRI and ultrasound rooms will be new services for Bluefield.
The Bluefield Campus will also have a Safe Haven Baby Box, the fifth one in West Virginia and the first in southern West Virginia, Bowling said. This climate-controlled, padded device allows parents in crisis to safely and anonymously surrender a newborn up to 30 days old, as permitted under West Virginia's Safe Haven Law. Once a baby is placed inside, a silent alarm immediately alerts hospital staff to respond and provide care.
Mayor Ron Martin of Bluefield, W.Va. said the new emergency department will be more than another building.
'It's a promise that our families will have quicker access to lifesaving care, that our seniors, our children and our neighbors can count on world-class treatment right here at home,' he said. 'This ER means faster response times and outcomes and a renewed commitment to Bluefield.'
Twenty-five million dollars is a huge investment that the Princeton Community could not have made as a stand-alone hospital, said Rusty Sarver, Princeton Community Hospital Association Board Chair.
'This is definitely a pinnacle,' Sarver said to the audience. 'We do support Bluefield. We do support this side of the county. Everything that we do is for the people and at the end of the day, that's why we're here.'
Albert Wright, WVU Health System president and CEO, said groundbreaking ceremonies like the one conducted Thursday remind him how the Legislature started the West Virginia University Health System in 1996. It was created by the merging of WVU Hospitals in Morgantown and United Hospital Center in Bridgeport.
'At that time in the mid to late nineties, a lot of health care organizations around the country including West Virginia were being bought up by out-of-state, for-profit entities, ' Wright said.
There was a concern that if there was not a West Virginia-based hospital system, at some point all of the decisions about the state's health care would be made out of state. He said the new Bluefield campus will reinforce WVU Medicine's commitment to health outcomes in West Virginia.
Contact Greg Jordan at
gjordan@bdtonline.com
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