Sneak Peek: High-profile Phoebe projects will change the face of area health care

Carlton Fletcher, The Albany Herald, Ga.
·3 min read

ALBANY — Leading a group of Albany Herald journalists on a sneak-peek tour of the new Trauma and Intensive Care Tower and Living and Learning Community projects at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital Thursday, Phoebe Health System President/CEO Scott Steiner shows a keen awareness of each project, down to the smallest details.

"Our NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) is at 8,000 square feet now; it will be 40,000 when we move into the new facility ..."We'll have 50 handicap parking spots in the new parking lot and some EV chargers ... people will have to pay to charge their vehicles. One charging station costs around $100,000 ..." "We're currently licensed for 27 beds in our NICU, but that will increase to 40 ..." "Those timbers on the wall came from the old Albany High building ... some of them were 40 feet long ..." "We'll have 80 rooms in the Living & Learning Community, 40 each on the second and third floors, 76 one-bedroom units and four two-bedrooms ..." "We'll have a behavioral health unit in the Trauma and Intensive Care Tower that will allow us to more adequately deal with mental health issues ..."

Steiner's command of the details surrounding the projects, which come at a cost of $156 million for the Trauma and Intensive Care Tower and $45 million for the Living and Learning Community, a joint project with Albany Technical College, notwithstanding, the tour offered a glimpse of projects that are going to put Phoebe firmly in the forefront of modern-day health care. Both projects, Steiner said, are "within the range of what we originally expected," costwise.

It's easy to imagine visitors from all over the state and, indeed, the nation, visiting Phoebe to find out how they might pull off a similar public/private project to the Living & Learning Community.

A ribbon-cutting opening the Living & Learning Community is scheduled for Aug. 5, while the Trauma Center project will open in phases: the new emergency room in November, the NICU in December and the Intensive Care Unit in January.

"We tried to consider all of the details as we planned the projects," Steiner said. "We visited newly built ERs in Dallas, Tampa, Boston and one in California and asked them about their facilities. We asked them what they liked best about their buildings and what they would have done different."

Greenspace, outdoor benches and walking paths, larger and more comfortable waiting rooms, lots of windows that offer sunlight and views that decrease the often bleakness of a hospital setting, new furnishing — beds, tables, chairs, couches, TVs, refrigerators, dish washers — and other amenities in dorm rooms, redundant utilities in each room down to padded tile that offers "at least a fraction of comfort to people who are on their feet all day" — are all part of the planning that has gone into making these projects as comfortable and efficient as possible for patients, their families and hospital staff in the trauma center, and administrators, faculty and students in the Living & Learning Community.

And, as promised, the "1,000 or so" brick recovered from the old Albany High building ("We tried to save as many as possible, but unfortunately, the majority of them crumbled when we took them down.") have been incorporated into the design of the Living & Learning Community. Other recovered also items will be prominently displayed.

"We're not looking at a large staffing increase as we transition into these new facilities," Steiner said. "There may be a few more positions. Our feeling is that we've got the staff to do the job; we just want to give them nicer and updated facilities and let them do their job."