New Neillsville hospital almost ready for May 10 opening

With about a month to go before their new facility at N3700 River Avenue just outside of Neillsville is offi cially opened, workers at the Marshfield Medical Center— Neillsville (MMC) hospital are adding the finishing touches to the building. At this point, the details are the most important, as everything brought into the new building will enhance the abilities of the practitioners at the hospital to care for their patients.

Expected to officially open for its first patients on May 10, the new hospital is currently in the process of getting filled with the necessary equipment, from furniture in the waiting rooms to the machines that will be used to diagnose patients. Special care has been given to every one of these decisions, as this will be the place MMC— Neillsville will grow and provide care for years to come. “We are building for the future,” said Candace Marg, the director of community relations for the Marshfield Clinic Health System. “With everything that we added, it can be used now, or five years from now. We can grow here.”

There are many things that have been added to the new hospital that Marg said were not present or widespread in the old building located on the southwest side of Neillsville. With advancing technology and with an awareness of the shortcomings of the old facility, she said they were able to build the new hospital to not only make it more comfortable for their patients, but also to make it easier for doctors to give care.

“It’s more inviting,” she said of the new hospital. “It’s calming and serene and that is what we want; not just for the patients, but for the staff as well.”

For the patients, Marg said there are many things that have been added to make their stays and visits easier. Large, open windows to the outdoors are the norm throughout the facility, handrails exist through the entire length of the hospital, and in-patient rooms have numerous features to allow patients and their families and visitors to remain comfortable during their stay.

The doctors, too, will notice features to the building that will make their jobs easier, Marg said. In the hospital area, many doors have motion sensors nearby to allow them to open hands-free. In the operating room, Marg said the equipment has been built into the ceiling above to help doctors and nurses avoid tripping over cords and tables when they are trying to save a life. When the facil- ity opens, she said these small details will go a long way in improving care.

“We are very happy with this,” she said. “It’s a lot bigger, everything is modern and new. It makes it more effective and makes it so that everyone who comes into the room will be able to do their job.”

Besides these details, there are also some major changes in some of the larger equipment that will be used from time to time at the new hospital. In the imaging department, the manager said the new X-ray machines, CT scanner, and other machines are all the same type of machines that are being used at other area hospitals for their patients. Because they are all the same, he said the images produced by scans will now be able to be compared to other images taken at other hospitals without worrying about differences due to machine type.

“It is very nice, all of it is new,” he said. “The machines all now use the same parts, so it makes it easier for the technicians to operate. When we first joined with Marshfield, we had different brands of machines that we used, so it will be nice to have things that will be able to work together. We all now have the same equipment. You can go to a hospital here or elsewhere in the state and the images will all look the same now.”

The new hospital also has a room to serve bariatric patients. In the past, said the director of nursing, the Neillsville facility had to either rent a specialty bed for bariatric patients or have them transferred to another facility that could meet their needs. That will no longer be a problem.

“(In the past) If we had a bariatric patient we would have to rent a specialty bed or need to transfer them somewhere else because we did not have the equipment for them,” she said. “Now we have a specialty bed that has a thousand-pound weight limit that we can use.”

Although the new facility will officially open on May 10 with its first patients, Marg said the transition process will actually begin over the weekend of May 8-9. Starting with the Emergency Room, she said patients will begin being transferred after 5 a.m. on Saturday morning, and anyone coming to the hospital with an emergency situation will be directed on to the new facility for treatment.

“At 5 a.m. that Saturday morning the ER will no longer see patients,” she said. “There will be a process to take the patients one by one in an ambulance to the new hospital until all the patients are gone. People coming after that will be directed to the new hospital.”

The rest of the hospital’s services will resume at the new facility on May 10. The gift shop, and Art of Optometry will also open at the N3700 River Ave. location the same day. Sniteman’s Pharmacy and the YMCA Fitness Center are expected to open the following week on May 17.