Iraan hospital getting ready

IRAAN Double taxation will soon mean triple the size for Iraan General Hospital.

The Pecos County city is scheduled to open a new 34,000-square-foot facility later this month. Teresa Callahan, hospital administrator, said improvements to the 11,000-square-foot building built in the 1950s will make a big difference.

While the number of patient rooms will remain at 14, Callahan said the new rooms would be larger with wider bathrooms.

"At the other hospital, you cannot walk around the beds at all," she said.

The hospital will also be more technologically advanced. A new 16-slice CT scan will be in the hospital. Patients now have to go outside and into another building for scans.

"If it's cold or windy or rainy, we have to bring the patient out in that," Callahan said.

Plus, the more advanced machine will be able to detect more, potentially saving patients from having to be transferred to larger hospitals.

The project has been in the works for five years, Callahan said. The first step happened in 2004, when voters elected to create a hospital district in Iraan.

Construction for the $12 million hospital was authorized when voters passed a bond referendum in 2006. Construction began in July 2007.

Callahan said it's worth residents having to pay both into the Iraan district as well as Pecos County Memorial Hospital in Fort Stockton.

"There's not really much we can do," she said. "That's the price we pay."

The Iraan hospital is a Level IV trauma center, serving a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 10.

The new emergency room will be able to better serve patients involved in accidents, Callahan said.

Kathie Parmer, the hospital's laboratory manager, said the new hospital would make a big difference in her department.

"That's what we've been able to do is update more lab equipment," she said.

While she doesn't plan to add many positions to the hospital's current staff of 44, Callahan said the new hospital would give workers more room to spread out.

"We're not going to know what to do with all this," she said jokingly, "but it's going to be used very, very quickly."

Also the hospital's nurse practitioner, Callahan looks forward to the new nurse's station with a 65-foot-long countertop that overlooks two critical care rooms. She said it's a step up from the four chairs they now have crammed together.

She also is excited about the size of the new hospital's clinic, not to mention that it's part of the hospital, not separate like at the old building.

"I won't have to sit on the floor to chart anymore," she said.

Three doctors serve the hospital, two of whom work at a time in two-week-on, two-week-off shifts.