BENNINGTON — To illustrate people’s struggles with returning to normal life amid the pandemic, the Guilford Community Church is preparing an Advent display featuring three doors. The wooden doors, of different colors, sizes and designs, are being repurposed from various buildings.
One comes from a bathroom stall of a Bennington hospital building.
“You would never know it’s a bathroom stall door, except it’s short,” said Dwayne Johnson, a Guilford Community Church member, who was drawn to the door’s five panels. “It’s really unusual.”
Johnson bought the door from Deconstruction Works, a local company that salvages building materials otherwise headed for the landfill. The company recently worked with Southwestern Vermont Medical Center to strip attic insulation, floorboards, bathroom fixtures and other reusable lumber in the demolition of a circa-1925 hospital building.
The demolition is part of a two-year, $28 million project to expand and upgrade the Bennington hospital’s emergency department.
The renovation is the department’s first since 1974, when it was designed to accommodate 14,000 patients a year, at what was then Putnam Memorial Hospital. The emergency department now sees nearly 25,000 patients a year, according to hospital officials. The construction work would double the department’s size.
“A lot has changed over that period of time,” said Jill Maynard, director of nursing for the hospital’s emergency department and intensive care unit. She spoke to VTDigger along with Ray Zimmerman, the director of engineering, and Ray Smith, public information officer.
Smith pointed to a variety of factors for the increase in emergency department patients, including the downsizing of another emergency department in a neighboring Massachusetts county and a reduction in local primary care providers. The rapid aging of Vermont’s population is also a factor.
The renovation aims to enlarge existing rooms to meet evolving industry standards, as well as upgrade facilities and equipment. The project, which started this month, is expected to be completed in mid-2024.
The $28 million project cost will be funded through a combination of a fundraising, equity contribution and debt financing, the hospital said.
Planned expansion, upgrades
The plan includes creating more spacious, private exam rooms, which would do away with curtains that currently separate some spaces. Waiting rooms would also be larger, where patients with injuries can be segregated from those who are sick, such as people running a fever or who have a cough.
An area will be added for patients whose conditions are not life-threatening, such as sprains or lacerations. Four patient chairs will be dedicated to them, where Maynard said the treatment process is quicker.
The existing Emergency Crisis Area, designated for people experiencing mental health distress, will be expanded from three to five beds. That section of the hospital — which is quieter, safer and more private than the bustling emergency department — is where patients stay until they’re moved to an inpatient psychiatric facility.
After technology upgrades, the entire emergency department will be able to be transformed into a negative pressure space. That would prevent potentially contaminated air or other dangerous particles from flowing into other areas.
“Something that we learned throughout the pandemic,” Maynard said, “is that dealing with Covid patients is ideally done in negative pressure areas.”
In the expanded emergency department, all 14 exam rooms would be equipped with telehealth, operated in partnership with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. The service enables emergency room patients and care providers to speak with doctors or nurses at Dartmouth-Hitchcock through a video link.
Telehealth can be activated so that remote care providers can start seeing patients if their counterparts in Bennington are busy, Maynard said. It can also be used for consultations, recommendations and support among care providers. Now, only two of the emergency department’s exam rooms in Bennington offer telehealth.
A pneumatic tube system would also be installed to speed up the transportation of specimens to the lab and medication from the hospital pharmacy.
The new additions to the emergency department are scheduled to be unveiled in June 2023, said Zimmerman. Afterward, the existing department spaces would be renovated.
He described “a tough balance” of running the construction work along with maintaining the daily emergency department operations.
“If it seems like it might even be a little extended or protracted, that’s why,” Zimmerman said. “We have our fundamental responsibility to our community and our patients to keep our doors open.”
The medical center’s patients hail from Bennington County and surrounding counties, Smith said. These include Windham County in Vermont, Rensselaer County in eastern New York and Berkshire County in western Massachusetts.
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Bennington emergency department undergoing $28 million renovation - vtdigger.org
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