Hospital announces $30M expansion

Published 5:15 am Friday, June 28, 2019

Cullman Regional is expanding again with a $30 million project that will increase the size of its Critical Care Unit and Emergency Department.

In a press conference to announce the expansion Thursday morning, Cullman Regional CEO James Clements said expansion will increase the capacity of the Critical Care Unit by 50 percent, increase the capacity of the Emergency Department by 50 percent and add more private rooms to reduce the usage of semi-private rooms throughout the facility.

He said the expansion is necessary to keep up with the increased number of patients that the hospital is seeing every year.

“Our current emergency room was built for a capacity not to exceed around 40,000 patients a year, we are seeing around 50,000 patients a year in our emergency room,” he said. 

The project will also include the development of an outpatient behavioral health program, which will also help some of the patients that are coming into the emergency room get the treatment they need, Clements said.

“We are seeing over 1,000 behavioral health patients a year in our emergency room,” he said. “Those are people who are struggling to find ways to access care.”

The hospital will also receive an infrastructure upgrade in order to accommodate the additional capacity. The infrastructure upgrade will include the expansion of the onsite power plant by approximately 1,100 square feet, the replacement of the cooling towers, the addition of two new chillers, the addition of new elevator controls and the modification of the remaining two service elevators to allow them to access all levels of the hospital.

TRO Jung|Brannen Architect Hal Starkey, who is working on the project with his partner Grady Black, said he and Black worked on Cullman Regional when it was originally built, and they have enjoyed helping the hospital grow over the years.

“I think Cullman represents an example of a hospital that was designed to allow for expansion,” he said.

The hospital recently filed a Letter of Intent to file a Certificate of Need to the Alabama State Health Planning & Development Agency followed by the official filing of the CON. If approved, anticipated construction will begin in the third quarter of 2020.

Phase 1 of construction will include the expansion of the Emergency Department; phase 2 will include infrastructure improvements and Phase 3 will be the addition of the critical care beds, which will be a ground-floor to fourth floor expansion of the west units of the current facility. 

Starkey said the project will be adding on to the emergency room, but the different phases of construction will not disrupt the existing operations of the hospital.

“The design works to allow the emergency room to function,” he said. “We know as healthcare architects that you can’t shut down for any period of time.”