After more than two years, the newly renovated Women and Children’s Center at Odessa Regional Medical Center is ready to go.
The project, which began in the middle of the COVID pandemic, cost nearly $20 million and transformed the original building constructed in 1975.
All the patient areas and rooms were renovated to create an inviting environment for patients and their families. They added a seven-bed obstetrical emergency department to care for moms who need emergent care during their pregnancy. The area also includes two operating rooms and additional support space.
President Stacey Brown said they don’t have an exact opening date yet. They are recruiting for a few open positions so it will open after they are hired and complete their orientation. For now, the Obstetrics Emergency Department is being opearted in the labor and delivery area until the new space is fully staffed.
It will be staffed by a board-certified obstetrician. There also is a place for the physicians to sleep. There also is a procedure room they can expand into.
The lobby and registration space also has been updated to be more accommodating to patients and visitors. The Secret Garden Gift shop and Coffee shop will open in the next few months.
The 150,000-square-foot area now features modern decor, higher ceilings and is lighter and brighter.
“We thought that it would be about a year to 15-month project,” Brown said. “It ended up being over two years.”
The hospital started as a women and children’s facility. From that time forward, Brown said she believes it has undergone three expansions and multiple renovations.
“This project was focused primarily on the patient-facing areas,” Brown said, such as patient rooms, the lobby and the new obstetrics emergency department.
The seven-bed obstetrics emergency department is repurposed space that ORMC previously had, but it was vacant.
“We’re really proud of the aesthetics of it all. The color scheme is totally different. Our goal was to make it very comforting and inviting for our patients and their families,” Brown said. “We recognize that the birthing process can be stressful as it is and we wanted them to be able to have an environment such as this that puts them at ease and makes them feel comforted,” Brown said.
Brown said the admitting area was renovated as well.
The new space also offers a lot of nice seating and Wi-Fi connectivity so people can charge devices while they’re waiting.
Chief Nursing Officer Carol Cates said the raised ceilings are what strikes her about the renovation. They also took out a yellow casing around the door that seemed to take a lot of light out of the space.
“They opened so much of this up by raising the ceilings, changing the entrance and adding more glass. … Even with the lights off in here, it’s so much lighter and brighter. It’s not just the paint that went into that thought. It really was about making it peaceful and calming and spacious. When you build a new building, our modern architecture is so open … that’s easy to do. But with a 50-year old building, that’s not so easy,” Cates said. “The architects, to me, really were able to do that in this lobby and I still can’t believe it’s the same building.”
The project architect was JSA Architects, which has worked with the hospital for decades, and Brown wanted to give a shoutout to Jay Bradford for his work on the project, Brown said. The construction firm was Teinert Construction of Lubbock.
“This is the first time we’ve worked with Teinert and they were fantastic partners during this process,” she said.
The age of the building is one reason the project took longer than initially anticipated.
“A special thanks to Steward Healthcare, our parent company, who supported us in this and made sure we got the funding to be able to do this renovation. It was initially budgeted at almost a $17 million project, but the price tag came in close to $20 million once it was all said and done,” Brown said. “Without Steward’s support on that, we would not have been able to get it done, so we’re very grateful for that support.”
When they started the renovations in June 2020, the COVID pandemic had just begun. Hospitals were shut down and they were not doing any elective surgeries.
“There wasn’t a lot going on anywhere except for emergencies and COVID. It hadn’t really hit here yet, so we weren’t really experiencing that aspect of it yet. But the shutdown part of it we were and the concerns with volume and the financial impact of all of that was very prevalent in the hospital industry, for sure. But we never missed a beat. We weren’t delayed a day in terms of when we were supposed to start,” Brown said. “We were slated to start in June and we started in June, so we were very grateful for that because I could certainly see where someone may feel that we should hold off on this a little bit to see what was going to happen. But that was not the direction of all that came from Steward, so we’re very appreciative of that.”
Cates said there are seven fairly spacious private rooms and an isolation room if someone has a communicable disease.
“One important distinction is we’ll be the only hospital that has a dedicated obstetrics emergency department,” Brown said. “The patients in the past have gone through your regular emergency room.”
They will have two new dedicated ORs with all new equipment and technology. The OR tables can rotate 360 degrees and the lights can be flipped to the right spot, as well.
There is a laparoscopic tower for those types of surgeries.
“This is where all the cameras connect and they can visualize what they’re seeing inside on these two screens here, so no matter where everybody’s standing, they can see,” Cates said.
There are sterile sleeves so surgeons can reach up and adjust the light and screen and not have to worry about contaminating anything else.
There is another, larger OR that was built bigger in case ORMC wants to add a third robot, Cates said.
“The thing is, if you’ll notice, almost everything is on the ceiling and that is really helpful for avoiding tripping hazards and helping keep the place clean and safe,” Cates said.
The larger ORs are also helpful because if you have a big surgery, you’ll have the patient, plus eight to 10 people, including the surgeon, nurses and 30 pieces of equipment in a small room. The extra space ensures that people aren’t on top of each other.
Cates said they plan to do all their gynecological procedures in the building.
The eventual plan is to have all the scheduled non-emergent C-sections in the area as well, which Brown said will give them more capacity for laboring mothers in the labor and delivery unit.
Oftentimes they were not able to take care of the patients who wanted to deliver at ORMC because they were full.
“Deliveries are not things you can schedule, so you never knew. It’s kind of feast or famine at times. You never knew what the census might be, so with that we’ve really added additional capacity where they shouldn’t be delayed or have to go somewhere else because we’re full,” Brown said.
She added that the hospital began as Women and Children’s Hospital and it had that name until the early 1990s.
“We renamed it at that time to Odessa Regional and eventually Odessa Regional Medical Center. Since this … is the original campus and it’s the campus where we do most of our maternity, NICU and all those related services, we renamed this campus from the West Campus to Women’s and Children’s,” Brown said. “If you look at it, our front entrance, you’ll see Odessa Regional Medical Center at the top, but right over the awning it says Women and Children’s. That was to go back to our roots. That’s how we started our hospital and we’ve grown over these 48 years into a full-service hospital without losing the focus on what really got us here.”
Brown said she was there when the name change occurred.
“I think it was very meaningful to a lot of us,” she added. Some of the physicians were there back then and so it was “really neat” to be able to incorporate some of that into the expansion.
Brown said they have been averaging about 180 births a month at ORMC and they have renovated around them, which impacted their volume.
“We have patients that were wanting to come here that we just couldn’t accommodate during that period and so that’s what we’re most excited about is to be able to rebuild that because our numbers were stronger before the renovation,” Brown said.
Asked if the renovation will help ORMC’s bottom line, Brown said she thinks it definitely will.
“It’s what we do, take care of patients, so generally the stronger your volume, the stronger your bottom line. It’s not the only factor … we have to manage and operate efficiently and we have the qualified staff and medical staff to be able to do that. There are a lot of different pieces, but we do anticipate we will get a return on this investment. It’s the name of the game,” Brown said.
She added that they will have to hire more staff and are in the process of doing that.
Asked about building a new building, Brown noted that ORMC is a for-profit facility with no tax support, so new construction wasn’t feasible.
Funding for the renovation came from the corporate level, but Brown said they contributed through their earnings.
“We had … ample space that we could renovate … and had spaces that we could grow into that accommodated our needs. Some other areas were vacated, and so we had that capacity to be able to repurpose. That’s what we wanted to do with this, especially now that as part of our Level 3 maternal designation; we wanted that OB ED. We have the doctors here already. It made sense to have a dedicated space for them to work in,” Brown said.
COVID hit harder and longer than people anticipated and that impacted hospitals across the country, Cates said. She noted that it’s still going on, which is why everyone was wearing masks.
Brown said hospitals nationwide are struggling as a result of COVID and the increased cost of labor that they still have today. Nurses also have retired or changed careers. There also were supply chain pressures.
“Just the pressure on the financial aspect of running hospitals is so much greater today than it was pre-pandemic and a lot of it is ramifications from the pandemic,” Brown said.
Asked if there was any danger of ORMC closing, Brown said, “I don’t believe so. Not at all.”
“This hospital is very strong and it has been a strong community partner. We continue to do that as we always have. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a difficult and challenging time. I think absolutely it is, but again, not just for us but for many hospitals across the region and across the country. What you have to remember when you think about our hospital is we are not tax supported. We are a private hospital, so that means there’s not other funding that can help you through times like this when it is this challenging. We don’t have that funding others do. It’s a major distinction that I think is important to make,” Brown said.
She acknowledged that the federal government provided some loans to hospitals and they had to pay those back. They had to pay those loans back last year as a company, she said.
A for-profit healthcare company has to generate the revenues to cover the operating expenses, capital reinvestment and equipment reinvestments.
“We’ve been through challenging times before. All hospitals do. It’s always a cycle and this too is a cycle,” Brown said.
Cates said they have incredibly gifted people at ORMC and they will survive.
“I always like to tell people, because I believe this with all my heart, that a building is just a building. It doesn’t really even matter how beautiful it is or how modern, how great the technology is and how much you reinvest in the building. The care is all about the people who are here and we have the best staff — bar none — of any hospital around, I believe. I believe that because part of it is just our culture; how we come together. They’re great in what they do, but they’re really great in how we band together to get through the challenging times, whether it’s COVID or other difficulties and I believe that will lead us strongly into the future,” Brown said.
