YOU ARE HERE: Central Kentucky Home→Collections

More beds approved for Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center

August 18, 2006

The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services Office of Health Policy has approved Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center's certificate of need request for 20 additional acute care beds. The additional beds bring the medical center's capacity to 222 beds, which will be available once the expansion project is completed in late 2007.

"We are very pleased that our request for these additional beds has been granted," said L. Clark Taylor Jr., chief executive officer of Ephraim McDowell Health. "We need these additional beds to respond to a continuing and increasing need for sufficient beds to treat the acutely ill patients who seek medical care from our hospital."

Currently, the medical center has a state-approved capacity of 187 beds. The addition of 15 beds that it was granted in 1999 has been on hold pending moving forward with either an expansion or an expansion and renovation of existing facilities.

Taylor said the hospital often finds itself in need of additional beds, especially considering the high occupancy of its acute beds has reached critical, emergency proportions during recent years and is not expected to improve.

In requesting the certificate of need for 20 additional beds, the medical center considered a variety of factors, including: the current high occupancy; growth in population, physicians and services; the number of patients that at times must go on waiting lists to be admitted; the number of patients transferred because of lack of beds; patient matching by gender, age and illness factors; the closure of unlicensed labor rooms; and the need to improve care through dedicated units restricted to particular patient types.

Currently, the medical center has a designated Cancer Care Center with 12 private rooms, a 14-bed orthopedic unit, eight pediatric rooms, a 12-bed ICU/CCU unit, an 18-bed Women's Health Unit and four Level II neonatal beds.

"These additional acute care beds will permit these special care units to dedicate themselves solely to these unique patient populations," Taylor said. "In turn, that will limit infections and make care more tailored and efficient for our patients."

With the current expansion project, Ephraim McDowell plans to create a second Intensive Care Unit with 12 of the new acute care beds. This will permit the hospital to have four of the beds designated for coronary care within the ICU.

The expansion project also is projected to provide a new 25,757 square foot Mother-Baby Unit featuring seven new labor/delivery/recovery/post-partum (LDRP) rooms plus six post-partum beds.

|

|

|