| AVON – On Friday, Oct. 27, the Indiana University Health board approved major capital funding to support the expansion of IU Health West Hospital.
The $83 million investment will add 48 inpatient beds, new operating room (OR) and cath lab capacity, and will include expansion of support services space to accommodate additional staff and higher patient volumes.
“The communities we are privileged to serve have grown by leaps and bounds, and our ability to provide care to the all of the patients who need us has been challenged by our capacity,” explains Doug Puckett, president of IU Health West Hospital. “In the past year alone, we had to transfer more than 1700 patients to other facilities, not because our teams couldn’t provide them with excellent care, but because we did not have an available bed for them.”
The planned expansion will add another floor to the hospital’s “B” inpatient tower. It will also add two floors and increase the footprint on north side of the building to expand functional spaces including OR, cath lab, lab, kitchen/cafe and classroom areas.
The approval comes on the heels of another key renovation and expansion project at IU Health West: increasing the size and improving patient flow of the hospital’s emergency department. The emergency department at IU Health West Hospital sees upwards of 47,000 patients annually. The most recent expansion, set for completion in December, significantly improves patient welcome and triage, reduces the time for a patient to be seen by a provider, and adds five more treatment rooms, bringing the total to 28.
“We have been proud to serve the people of Hendricks County and beyond since we opened in late 2004. Funding for this latest, major expansion sets the stage for IU Health and IU Health West to continue to be the first choice for patients in our market for years to come,” Puckett says.
Final design work on the expansion is expected to begin January 2018, with construction set to begin by October. The project will take approximately two years to complete. |
