One of the biggest surprises – and announcements – from Mayor Tom Henry’s State of the City address had little to do with city government at all.FORT WAYNE – Local health care officials celebrated steel on Thursday.
The metal provides the skeletons for multimillion-dollar expansions and upgrades at the region’s two largest medical services providers.
Parkview Health topped off its $536 million Parkview Regional Medical Center construction project Thursday morning with the final steel beam, while Lutheran Hospital accepted the first delivery of steel to erect a fifth floor in a $42 million building addition.
Fort Wayne-based Steel Dynamics Inc. manufactured most of the steel used in the Parkview construction and will make all the steel for Lutheran’s project.
Lutheran’s fifth floor, which will allow the hospital to offer all private rooms, is scheduled to be completed in December 2011, the same month Parkview’s construction is slated to wrap up.
Parkview Regional Medical Center is on track to begin admitting patients in April 2012.
About 750 people were working at the Parkview site Thursday, according to Aaron Lybarger, senior project manager for Weigand/Pepper Construction.
Mark Hisey, Parkview Health’s vice president overseeing the center’s construction, led local media on a tour of the work-in-progress.
Starting on the seventh floor, Hisey described how the still-open areas will be divided into more than 400 private rooms in the medical center and nearby Parkview Heart Institute. More than 500 doctors, nurses, technicians and therapists offered input so the layout can accommodate their job duties.
Parkview built mock-ups of patient, emergency, intensive care, trauma and other rooms to ensure the latest design innovations are incorporated. The physical therapy and dialysis departments are being placed on floors close to patients most likely to need those services.
“This is a 50-year building,” Hisey said. “We want to make sure we get it right.”
The seventh floor will be empty when the medical center opens. The space can be finished into 78 additional patient rooms when the need arises, he said. The third floor will open with 24 intensive care beds and room for 12 additional ICU rooms in the future.
The three-story lobby will include a three-story artwork and a waterfall that connects with an outdoor stream, Hisey said. The building’s interior and landscaped exterior will include greenery, wood, stone and sunlight.
“We talk,” he said, “about putting the ‘park’ back into Parkview.”
