Friday, February 18, 2000
Christ Hospital plans $77 million facelift
Gift will pay for entire project
BY TIM BONFIELD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Jim Gamble, chairman of the Elizabeth Gamble Deaconess Home Association, presents a model of the new facility.
(Glenn Hartong photo)
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Christ Hospital has launched a three-year, $77 million construction project that will rebuild its cardiac-care services, expand its emergency department and relocate its school of nursing.
The project, announced Thursday, will be entirely paid for by a gift from the Elizabeth Gamble Deaconess Home Association, the charitable foundation that built the original Christ Hospital 111 years ago.
And unlike some suburban hospital service expansions that have been criticized as unnecessary or wasteful, the Christ Hospital project is winning praise from business interests as a necessary effort that will offer state-of-the-art care for Tristate heart patients.
“No one is going to object to this type of thing,” said Paul Beckman, president of Paragon Health System, the company that manages local health plans for Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield.
“This area does not need any more inpatient hospital capacity, that's for sure. But hos pitals do need to keep up to date with technology. And that's what this project is doing,” Mr. Beckman said.
The project will be one of the largest Tristate health-care construction jobs in several years. It's smaller than the recently completed $90 million expansion of Jewish Hospital in Kenwood and the $128 million expansion under way at Children's Hospital Medical Center, but bigger than the $23 million addition of open-heart services at Mercy Hospital Fairfield announced in late 1999.
Work will start within weeks with the demolition of a vacant research building along the hospital's front drive off Auburn Avenue. That site will become home to a new, larger building for the Christ Hospital School of Nursing.
Once completed, the old school of nursing in the back of the hospital will be demolished to make room for a four-story, 110,000-square-foot “heart center.”
The new building, to be complete in 2003, will house an expanded emergency department, operating suites, cardiac catheterization and electrophysiology labs, cardiac and surgical intensive care units, a cardiac “step-down” unit for post-intensive care, plus space for other diagnostic equipment.
“This hospital has not had an improvement of this nature or size since 1988,” said Tom Petry, chairman of the Christ Hospital board of trustees.
By paying for the work through a foundation gift, the Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati will not have to borrow money and then find a way to fit expanded debt payments into an extremely tight operating budget.
After losing $88 million in two years, the Health Alliance (which includes Christ Hospital) is working under a turnaround plan aimed at slashing $36 million in costs in one year. Budgets have little room for capital spending.
Without the gift, the hospital still would have needed to modernize its intensive-care areas because they are housed in outdated 1960s-era units.
But the replacement project would have taken longer to start, been smaller in scope, and would have done nothing to improve the nursing school, said Jack Cook, Health Alliance president.
The Health Alliance also includes the Jewish, University, St. Luke and Fort Hamilton hospitals.
The project announced Thursday will not reduce services at the other Alliance hospitals, officials said. Aside from the expanded emergency department, the renovation will have no short-term effect on jobs or overall hospital capacity.
Long-term, however, the Alliance hopes the state-of-the-art facility will help it maintain, possibly even gain market share in cardiac services, which in turn may lead to more jobs, Mr. Cook said.
A large investment in a hospital on “Pill Hill,” the concentration of hospitals in central Cincinnati, runs counter to recent hospital trends.
Many high-tech services have been shifting to the suburbs while institutions such as Bethesda Oak and Jewish Hospital in Avondale have recently closed.
“This reflects our commitment to maintaining a strong presence in Mount Auburn and the central city,” Mr. Petry said.
When the dust settles, the nursing school will expand its class capacity by 25 percent and the emergency department will roughly double in capacity.
A decade ago, Christ Hospital's emergency department was seeing about 20,000 patients a year and was at its designed capacity. Now, its staff squeezes in about 30,000 patients a year.
Emergency visits have grown by several thousand a year since Jewish Hospital closed in 1997 and life squads started routing patients away from Bethesda Oak in the months before its final Feb. 4 closing.
Alliance officials have not decided what to do with the space that will be vacated by the current intensive care and cardiac services. The research functions at the building to be demolished were moved a few years ago to Children's Hospital.
ABOUT THE ASSOCIATION
The Elizabeth Gamble Deaconess Home Association was founded in 1888 as a Methodist philanthropic organization to serve the poor and sick of Cincinnati. It was named after Elizabeth Gamble, wife of James Gamble, whose soap business eventually became the Procter & Gamble Co.
The association launched a 10-bed hospital in 1889 in the West End at 46 York St. The hospital moved to Mount Auburn in 1893, opened a nursing school in 1902, then was renamed the Christ Hospital in 1904.
Today, the association serves as a non-profit foundation that supports capital improvements for the Christ Hospital. Its overall endowment is about $450 million.
The association's funds come from thousands of private gifts over the years along with the proceeds from investing those donations. The largest gifts have come from the Gamble and Nippert families.
The $77 million gift to Christ Hospital announced Thursday was the biggest gift ever awarded by the association.
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