Conway Regional breaks ground on $13 million building
CONWAY — The Conway Regional Health System broke ground last week on a $13 million, threestory building that officials said will help solve a good problem to have — growth.
“It’s very significant in the sense that it gives us room for growth,” said Matt Troup, CEO and president of the Conway Regional Health System. “One of the challenges we face today is that when we recruit new physicians, we have a hard time figuring out where to put them.”
The 42,530-square-foot medical-office facility will be built on Ada Avenue on the medical center’s campus. The third floor will house the Conway Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinic, combining its two locations into one. The clinic includes
Drs. Andrew Cole, Carole Jackson, Phillip Gullic, Keitha Holland, Lauren Nolen and Katy Cox, and nurse practitioner Katie Boyd.
The first floor will include a specialty-therapy clinic for women’s issues, such as incontinence, as well as a lab [blood-] draw station, “to make it easier for patients,” Troup said.
“We’re still really filling out the first floor,” he said. “We’re contemplating different services there that we think might be beneficial to patients. One might be a pharmacy — I could foresee that there — maybe even a sandwich shop or a small retail shop. We’re taking our time.”
The point is to allow for growth, he said, not fill up the space immediately.
“We’ll have a floor shell for future expansion,” Troup said.
Andrea Woods, chairwoman of the Conway Regional Health System Board of Directors, said the construction project is a milestone.
“The medical-office building really allows us the ability to grow in the area of women’s services and our service lines in other areas” and fulfills the medical center’s tagline, “Get your care close to home,” she said.
“We need to continue to take care of our fantastic women’s program,” Woods said, which includes many obstetricians/ gynecologists. “Lots of families start at Conway Regional.”
She said the new facility fits in with residency opportunities at the medical center. A nursing residency exists, and a family-medicine residency application is being reviewed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
“We’ll need all the room we can get,” Woods said.
Troup said plans call for the facility to be connected to the main hospital with an enclosed walkway.
“Even though it’s a freestanding building, we will connect that with the rest of the campus,” he said. “It will connect with a corridor on the front all the way to our ER, so wherever you need to go, you’re inside a heated-and-cooled walkway.
“That will really change the look and feel of our entire campus,” he said. Troup added that the walkway project will be done down the road.
Woods said the corridor is something staff have wanted for some time, but it’s for patients and visitors, more importantly.
“It will be so easy to walk from visiting a new baby, to the cafeteria to have a meal, grab a cup of coffee and go to the gift shop,” she said.
The medical office building is the first ground-up construction on the campus in about 18 years but not the first improvement, by any means.
Troup said campus renovations have included a two-story, $32 million expansion in 2012 of the surgery and obstetrics area of the hospital.
Funding for both the new medical-office building and the capital-improvement projects is a combination of 2018 bond proceeds and revenue from operations. The building is part of a $60 million capital investment project that will expand and enhance services throughout the Conway Regional Health System, touching a total of 19 areas of the health system, according to a press release.
Other elements of the capitalinvestment project include a new and expanded critical-care unit, with work on that part of the project starting at the end of the year, Troup said. The unit, an 18-month project, will be created by adding a floor above the existing surgery center, and Troup estimated the construction will be completed in late 2021.
Woods said the hospital “has needed to do some significant capital improvements in our critical-care unit.” She said the CCU’s location will allow health-service providers “to move up and down in the facility more smoothly and access those patients easier to improve quality of care.”
The $60 million investment also includes upgrades to the pharmacy and lab services, and expansion of the hospital’s family-practice clinic in Greenbrier. A groundbreaking for that clinic is planned before the end of the year, too, Troup said. “It will be a brand-new clinic in Greenbrier,” to replace the existing one at the same location, he said.
The first step of the entire project featured a $1.2 million renovation of the Conway Regional Health and Fitness Center that was unveiled in May.
Troup said construction of the medical-office building will take, realistically, 14 months. Cromwell Architects Engineers designed the building, and Nabholz Construction of Conway is its general contractor.
Woods said the construction will be a catalyst for many changes.
“As a resident of Conway and a consumer of health services, I think it’s really going to open up a lot of doors in many ways,” she said.
“It’s going to give us breathing room.”