Holy Family plans new outpatient surgery department

A construction project that will bring a new outpatient surgery department and three floors of doctors’offices to north Spokane will be kicked off today by Holy Family Hospital officials.

Holy Family Hospital officials plan to break ground this evening on the second phase of a multi-year project to update and expand the hospital. Phase I, which was completed in 2003, saw the construction of a new emergency center, an imaging center and renovations to the building.

Phase II will add about 30,000 square feet of space for hospital outpatient services and 65,000 square feet of office space to the north side of the 700,000square-foot-hospital, officials said. Construction is expected to be completed in the fall of 2007.

Holy Family President Tom Corley said the addition of three floors of office space for cardiologists, vascular surgeons, orthopedic surgeons and potentially urologists makes health care in north Spokane safer and more efficient because experts and tools will be closer.

“It provides a great deal of convenience to everyone involved,” Corley said.

Currently, many physicians have to drive to the hospital from their clinics several times a day to check on their patients.

Corley said because the hospital was constructed in bits and pieces, related outpatient surgery services are located in separate parts of the building. The construction of new hospital space will streamline outpatient surgery services, Vice President for Clinical and Facility Operations Cathy Simchuk said.

Corley said the addition to the hospital will probably add several hundred more employees to the hospital’s 1,100-person staff.

The hospital addition will cost about $16 million and the office additions will cost roughly $8 million, Corley said.

In mid-April, hospital officials announced the groundbreaking of Phase II, but that event was called off because leases weren’t signed as fast as hospital officials had anticipated, spokeswoman Liz DeRuyter said.