UMC to get OK to expand facilities

Monday, Oct. 4, 2004 | 10:58 a.m.

University Medical Center on Tuesday should get the go-ahead for a major expansion that Clark County officials said should improve both the hospital's quality of care and number of services.

The $59.6 million expansion, to be funded primarily through bonds issued by the county-owned medical center, includes a remodeling of the northeast building and south wing of the hospital.

"This has been on the drawing board for the last three or four years," UMC chief executive officer Lacy Thomas said. "It will allow us to move our burn center and our outpatient pharmacy to the new tower. It moves our main laboratory to our new space. It provides new areas for physicians' offices, a cafeteria and 66 private rooms."

Expansion and new housing for the burn center will help bring in new equipment to serve patients with potentially life-threatening medical conditions, while the outpatient pharmaceutical expansion will give the hospital a more comfortable area to provide medical counseling, Thomas said.

The expansion comes as UMC continues its effort to rebound from a fiscal crisis two years ago in which the county commission was forced to allocate $38 million to cover bills.

Clark County Manager Thom Reilly said the expansion, though expensive, is a critical step in bringing new, paying patients to the hospital system. "There's been a big push to expand our payer mix, to capitalize on being a center of excellence," Reilly said.

"This is definitely in line with the corrective actions outlined (by analysts after the fiscal situation became apparent)." Reilly said one of the things that the county discovered in its analysis of the county health care system is that private physicians want to practice at the hospital.

Expanding facilities and providing more offices will help draw them -- and their paying customers -- to UMC, he said. While the burn center at UMC is the only one in town, improving the quality of care also helps the bottom line by attracting more patients with health insurance to the hospital, Reilly said.

The additional private rooms also will help draw covered patients. "To make sure we can survive financially, we have to increase capacity," he said. "It's no good bringing in these paying patients if we have no way to accommodate them."

The project will increase the hospital's size by more than 25 percent, from 853,000 square feet to 1.07 million square feet, Thomas said.

Work on the project should take 27 months and groundbreaking could happen within the next two months, Thomas said, and county staff have recommended Nevada-based Clark & Sullivan Construction for the job.

Larry Matheis, executive director of the Nevada State Medical Association, also said the work should strengthen UMC.

"It certainly enhances the availability of services and the quality of services that they are already providing," he said. "If UMC and the county feels they are able to step up their service delivery and infrastructure, that will be important for the community."