06-02-2025
Piedmont Columbus Regional Midtown project reaches half-way point with 23 new ICU beds
COLUMBUS, Ga. () — If you have been to the Piedmont Columbus Regional Midtown campus, you have undoubtedly noticed the crane and the construction. WRBL had an exclusive look at the progress on Wednesday.
This is a $58 million project that started a year ago. Brasfield & Gorie is renovating or constructing 99,038 square feet of hospital space. It's expected to bring 43 new ICU beds and a renovated 15-bed unit for oncology patients.
That is to say — if this was a football game, it's now halftime.
WRBL caught up with a man born at The Medical Center. He now plays an integral role in the renovation of the hospital.
'And it's kind of strange to be 42 years later, the place I was born,' said Brandon Boswell, a Brasfield & Gorie Superintendent. 'Building a new ICU expansion for the place I was born and the place that I'll be if anything happens to me. And I need health care. This is where I will be.'
That is one of the significant pieces of this hospital construction project for many of the Brasfield & Gorrie employees and subcontractors.
'There's a lot of local subcontractors that are participating in this project. Our whole team from management staff live in Columbus, either born in Columbus or currently live in Columbus,' said Boswell. 'This is the hospital that our families come to. You know, my grandma could be, you know, up in one of these ICU beds, one of these days. My kids have frequently visited this E.R. over the past few years.'
Boswell told us it added more of a personal aspect to the decision-making involved in working with the hospital, saying 'at the end of the day, when we're done, we could be in this hospital.'
When you go on a construction site, you don't normally think about community. But – as you heard – you do on this one.
Another unusual aspect of this construction site is that a lot of the work is being done while the hospital continues its operations.
To Brasfield & Gorrie Project Manager Chris Strong, hospital projects in general are special.
'The first thing you have to do for front and center every day is the patient experience, patient care. And you just have to plan around that,' said Strong. 'I mean, we've taken over an entire floor of an active hospital in the middle of flu season right now. So as you can imagine, the bed crunch is is pretty pretty tight for them right now.'
Strong says the tower was not originally planned to go vertical when it was constructed, so a lot of the front-end work went into the design.
'…as far as how much weight we could add to the building,' Strong told WRBL. 'How much, you know, what all would we have to do inside the hospital to fit the structure to allow for the vertical expansion.'
The first large piece of the project is almost complete. Twenty-three ICU beds, as well as a renovated floor, will all be ready next month.
For construction workers this is a difficult, yet rewarding project.
'Health care construction is more about communications than other types of construction, in my opinion,' said Strong. 'Just because there are so many different elements and so many different people, you're affecting, you know, advertently, inadvertently, when you're when you're building the project.'
One particularly impressive components of this construction is the addition of a seventh floor to the east side. Because this building was built in the mid-1970s, they are essentially building a new foundation six floors up.
All in all, the massive project is a classic example of short-term pain for long-term gain.
'Construction is difficult at best to try to dovetail it in with our normal activities. But to date, we've been very successful,' said Piedmont Columbus Regional Chief Nursing Officer Cary Burcham. 'We've done multiple construction projects on this campus in the last year and a half. And so disruptions are becoming sort of the new normal.'
Burcham says they've tried to create an environment that helps eases the fear of being in a hospital.
'Whenever you have a loved one in the ICU, it's scary, it's terribly scary. And when you walk in into an environment like this, what we've tried to create is an environment that is high tech, yet very comforting and instills confidence,' said Burcham. 'They have the space to do what they need to do. They have the equipment to do what they need to do. It looks functional, and I know that my loved one is receiving the best care that they can receive.'
And that attention to detail can be seen by new patient lifts that will offer caregivers a better way to treat those in the ICU.
'What we do right now to lift patients is very manual and we wanted to have automated equipment that would allow us to begin to normalize patients as they get well,' said Burcham. 'This lift equipment will move not only left to right, but front to back so that we can move patients to a bedside chair. We can take them to the bathroom, we can prepare them for early ambulation out in the hallway. So these are devices that we do not have currently today.'
The reward? The hospital and its staff knowing when this is done, it will create better care for patients.
Once again, it comes back to community.
'…there's an incredible sense of pride that we have as a trauma center and as a safety net hospital to meet the needs of our community,' said Burcham. 'And we take it very seriously. And I think the project that we've designed here is a huge step in that direction.'
This is a 24-month project that came on the heels of an 18-month project to open the Bill and Olivia Amos Children's Hospital in the old Doctors Hospital space. It's scheduled to be completed next spring.
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