Editor’s note: This article is by Rob Wolfe of the Valley News, in which it was first published March 23, 2015.
RANDOLPH — Officials at Gifford Medical Center announced last week that the hospital has plans to open a new nursing home and move its 25 patient beds from shared to private rooms.
In May, the Menig Extended Care Facility at Gifford Medical Center will relocate to a 30-acre property in Randolph Center, making way for the hospital to convert its shared two-bedroom units to single occupancy.
Hospital administrators said Sunday that the intertwined projects will allow seniors at the nursing home to live within walking distance of the Randolph Center community, while providing privacy and extra space for hospital patients.
After completing a silent phase of donations that raised about $3.4 million for the project, officials at the hospital are extending the drive to the general public in hopes of raising an additional $1.6 million by the end of this year.
“We’re just at the beginning,” Gifford CEO Joe Woodin said of the renovations, which he said were part of a decade’s worth of future projects. “This is the first step of a campus-wide potential community that we’re going to build, integrated into Randolph Center.”
Gifford Medical Center now occupies about 15 aging buildings on Vermont 12 in Randolph, their construction dating back in some cases to the late 19th century, Woodin said.
“It’s been nice and it’s been cute,” he said of the Gifford Medical Center campus, which he jokingly called “The Christmas Village,” but maintenance and travel between buildings have become “really impractical and expensive.”
Woodin said the aim of the new nursing home and other projects is to consolidate the hospital’s campus and make it more efficient, which may require “eliminating” some other buildings, either by handing them to other organizations or by razing them.
Woodin said that about eight years ago the hospital had begun to assess the community’s health care needs: there are no assisted living beds in the county, he said, and the hospital for the past 20 years has consistently had a waiting list for nursing home beds, sometimes reaching as many as 100 people.
In the next few months, administrators will begin “firming up” plans for a 49-unit independent living building, he said.
At the soon-to-open Morgan Orchards Senior Living Community in Randolph Center, residents will live within walking distance of Vermont Technical College. Auditing classes there will be more convenient for senior residents, and students will have easier access to part-time jobs at the hospital, Woodin predicted.
The existing campus will largely eliminate its shared rooms, most of which were built in the 1950s and are, according to Woodin, “crowded.” The hospital executive said that he had been cautious about the changeover in the past because of cost concerns, but that the move was “definitely warranted, if not needed now, in these inpatient environments.”
Patients whose care requires equipment such as pumps and orthopedics need more space than the current rooms allow, he said, and shared spaces bring with them concerns related to privacy regulations and infection control. Add visiting friends and family, and “the small curtain that separates the two beds doesn’t cut it anymore,” he said.
The $5 million fundraising campaign that the hospital launched to finance the project is the largest that Ashley Lincoln, the medical center’s development director, has seen in her 14 years there.
Despite the large figures at stake, “This is the right project being done at the right time by the right organization,” Lincoln said in an interview Sunday. “We’re not breaking up families, and we’re keeping our neighbors in the community they’ve grown up in and worked in.”
Lincoln said the greatest share of the donations from the silent phase had come from the Gifford Medical Center Auxiliary, a separate nonprofit organization that runs a thrift shop on campus whose proceeds benefit the hospital. That group has given more than $600,000 to the campaign, and members of the volunteer board of trustees, the senior management team and senior trustees have also contributed, she said.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.
