Redmond’s $3.7 million makeover underway

New space for heart procedures and an intern program are among the projects set to be done this spring.

Hospital staff members are working around major renovations underway in the emergency room and operating suites at Redmond Regional Medical Center.

A major makeover in the basement — to facilitate a new internal medicine residency program and an upgrade to the cafeteria — also is keeping construction crews busy at the hospital.

Brad Stockton, chief operating officer at Redmond, said most of the work is expected to be completed this spring.

The emergency room project includes carving out an area where less serious patients can be treated.

“We’re also doing some restructuring of our trauma area to make it better for our clinical teams,” Stockton said. “When it’s all said and done, it’s going to be a little over $2 million.”

Redmond’s operating suite, which opened last fall, is being remodeled for a transcatheter aortic valve replacement program slated to start in April. TAVR is a procedure used by cardiologists to restore blood flow in a patient whose heart valve has not been opening fully.

Stockton said that remodel is costing approximately $1.3 million.

Offices also are being set up in the Redmond Medical Office Building next to the main hospital for the new internal medicine residency program set to start this summer. The residents will be housed in the renovated hospital basement.

“It’s going to have sleep rooms; it’s going to have showers and locker room facilities,” Stockton said. “The (Medical Office Building) is where they’re going to be seeing patients.”

Officials are currently selecting the first 10 residents who will move to Rome to begin their threeyear graduate residency training. Another 10 students will be added in each of the next two years, so there will eventually be 30 student-physicians a year in the program.

The hospital’s cafeteria upgrade includes a new Subway that opened in December. Stockton said the whole project is budgeted at approximately $400,000.

Meanwhile, he said, several local food trucks frequent the parking lot almost every day, to provide other options until the cafeteria renovations are done.

The addition of an adult psychiatric unit on the fifth floor of the hospital also is on the horizon. An application to the Georgia Department of Community Health for a certificate of need is due Feb. 26.

“It is a huge need — not only in Floyd County, but the state — for these types of patients,” Stockton said.

An earlier request for the CON required before work can start sought permission for 31 beds. The current plans call for 18 beds. The state requires a CON when major services are added to prevent the unnecessary duplication of services in a community.

Stockton said the cost to renovate the space for a psych unit is estimated at $3 million.

Doug Walker / Rome News-Tribune Michael O’Connor works on the wiring in the shower area of the Redmond Regional Medical Center basement that graduate medical education residents will use when the new program in Internal Medicine begins this summer.

Doug Walker / Rome News-Tribune Redmond nurse practitioner Terri Byars checks a chart before a new patient comes into one of the triage rooms in the new section of the emergency room.