Denny Gillard might feel a bit like a kid who has taken a peek at a Christmas gift this weekend. He doesn’t get to play with his new toys in the Girard Medical Center expansion until Monday morning, but he’s already excited about what he’ll do with them.
“This is three times bigger than what we had. It’s all open,” said Gillard, the GMC Director of Physical Therapy. “What we had before was small. Now, we’re right there or even better than any other clinic in the region. People locally can drive two minutes instead of 30 minutes to get great treatment.”
While GMC workers won’t move in to their new digs until Monday morning, officials cut the ribbon on the $10-million expansion on Saturday. That signaled the end of the biggest portion of a three- to five-year process to bring the medical center into the modern era.
Among those officials who opened the new expansion was GMC CEO Kenny Boyd. Boyd said the expansion will improve the level of health care in Girard.
“We provide great care,” Boyd said. “We’re a great provider of health care in the region and a great partner with the community. But being smaller means funds are limited. So we looked for direct impacts on patient care. We invested only in things that have a direct impact on patients.”
There are plenty of ways to see those investments at GMC:
• The new Intensive Care Unit comes with four private patient care rooms.
• The new surgery department features four pre-op patient areas, four post-op patient rooms, and three private extended recovery rooms. The operating rooms are also state-of-the-art, with almost all the equipment coming down from the ceiling, the room for orthopedic and bariatric procedures, three times the storage space, and a new computer system that will allow doctors access to X-rays through nearby monitors.
• The therapy departments have been largely increased, including making a hydrotherapy room private when it used to be hidden only by a curtain.
• There are also 12 patient care units (two rooms can be used for bariatric patients) that each include a station for doctors to update charts electronically in the patients’ rooms, a chart to monitor patient progress, and a special area for family members with its own television and couch that can fold into a sleeper.
