Phoebe Set to Open New Trauma & Critical Care Tower
Albany, GA | January 9, 2024 – Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital celebrated the completion of its new Trauma & Critical Care Tower with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday evening and plans to open the $150 million facility for patient care on Wednesday, January 15.
“The opening of this incredible new tower is the culmination of our Phoebe Focus initiative that we announced in 2019 – a plan which shaped our health system’s strategic investments in patient safety and patient care enhancements over the past five years,” said Phoebe Putney Health System President & CEO Scott Steiner. “This tower is the finest and most advanced medical facility in south Georgia, and it will ensure our ability to meet the dynamic healthcare needs of the people in our region for many years to come,” he added.
The tower, an extension of Phoebe’s flagship hospital in Albany, includes an emergency and trauma center, neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and surgical intensive care unit (SICU).
“Years of planning provided our care teams with numerous opportunities to have direct input into the design of these units to help us create the most efficient workflow and guarantee patient and family-centered facilities that provide the safest and best healing environment,” said Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital President Deb Angerami.
The main entrance to the tower will be on 4th Avenue from Jefferson Street, and patients and visitors will park in a new surface parking lot in front of the building. The first floor houses the emergency & trauma center, which earned state designation as a Level 2 Trauma Center and re-designation as a Level 1 Emergency Cardiac Care Center last year.
“We have four state-of-the-art trauma rooms all of which are connected to a large supply area dedicated solely to trauma supplies. That means we have more room to care for multiple trauma cases at once, and we have immediate access to everything we could possibly need to provide life-saving care,” said Phoebe Medical Director for Trauma Services Leon Dent, MD.
As soon as the new tower opens, phase 2 of the project will begin to completely renovate the current emergency room. When that work is complete, the result will be one seamless emergency & trauma center that, at more than 53,000 square feet, will be almost three times the size of the current ER.
“Our construction work isn’t quite finished yet. The new emergency & trauma center is amazing, but our waiting area space will be limited until the next phase of the project is finished. We ask for patience and understanding as we work as quickly as possible to make it to the finish line,” Angerami said.
As one of six regional perinatal centers in Georgia, Phoebe’s NICU cares for premature babies born in 22 counties. The new NICU on the second floor of the tower will greatly expand Phoebe’s capacity. Currently, the NICU is licensed for 27 beds, but the average daily census is nearly 40. With this addition, the NICU team will have room to care for 48 infants, with significant surge capacity if needed.
“Our NICU team does extraordinary work in extremely cramped quarters. We are all so excited to move into a new unit with new equipment where the patient rooms have windows and much more space to give families privacy and support family bonding. We’ve been looking forward to this day for years, and we can’t wait to move in,” said Phoebe Medical Director for Neonatology Erwinson Bassig, MD.
The tower’s third floor will be home to a 20-bed SICU, expanding Phoebe’s ability to care for its most critically ill patients. “We work closely with our trauma team, and many of our trauma patients end up in our surgical intensive care unit, so it makes sense to have our SICU in the same tower as our trauma center,” said Phoebe Medical Director for Critical Care Jyotir Mehta, MD. “Our other ICUs are nearby, and we will continue to employ a high intensity model of care which means we have teams of experts working collaboratively to provide the highest quality and most advanced care to our critically ill patients.”
The fourth floor of the tower is not currently built out. Last year, Phoebe leaders began a new multi-year strategic and facilities planning process to align future growth with the greatest health needs of the region. Part of that process will be to determine how to develop that fourth floor.
The roof of the building contains a helipad with direct elevator access to the trauma center. The current helipad on top of the adjacent parking garage will remain active, so the hospital could receive multiple trauma patients via air ambulance at the same time. The hospital has seen a significant increase in helicopter flights from the scenes of trauma incidents since achieving trauma center designation.
This week, Phoebe has conducted tours of the tower for employees and donors to the Phoebe Foundation. Community and business leaders joined members of the Phoebe Family at Thursday’s ribbon cutting and also toured the facility which was built by general contractor Hoar Construction.
Phoebe teams have been conducting emergency and safety drills in the new tower in recent weeks. They have also practiced moving patients. NICU and SICU patients will be transferred to the new units on January 15th. At 6 a.m. on the 15th, the new emergency & trauma center will open for new patients. Any patients arriving for emergency care will be directed to the new entrance. The current ER will remain open that day until all patients there at 6 a.m. have been either admitted to the hospital or discharged.