Kirkwood loses St. Joseph Hospital in move to Fenton

St. Louis Daily Record & St. Louis Countian, Dec 24, 2004 by Erin Suess

SSM Health Care-St. Louis announced plans to replace SSM St. Joseph Hospital of Kirkwood with a hospital of the future in southwest St. Louis County. The 158-bed hospital, to be located at Highway 141 and Bowles Ave. just south of I-44, will be part of a 54- acre health care campus, estimated to cost $215 million.

We hope to continue to serve this community, but we also want to make sure that people understand this will be a full-service, acute- care medical complex, said Sherry (Mohr) Hausmann, president designate at SSM St. Joseph Hospital who will also be president of the new facility. We'll keep the community feel but expand our level of technology. We're very excited about that. People always comment on how friendly this hospital is, and that's something we want to keep and just expand on that.

The hospital will feature the latest clinical technology and information systems to support a full range of services, including a 24-hour emergency department and comprehensive medical/surgical services such as heart, cancer, orthopedics and women's services. The campus also will include an outpatient care center offering convenient, one-stop service and a medical office building.

We'll have less licensed beds than we have today, but it'll actually run a higher census than Kirkwood has run for many years, so it's not really a downsizing, clarified Hausmann. We anticipate, when we are fully operational, we'll probably need about 150 more people than we have today. It's a great opportunity.

SSM Health Care's proposed health care campus takes into consideration all aspects of patient care, such as by providing large, private rooms, each with overnight accommodations for loved ones, and other supportive services.

What I've been asked to do is forget about everything we know about hospitals today and just take that out of our minds. Start with the patient in mind, and design our processes from the ground up to be as convenient and as safe and as helpful and as patient-centered as possible. If you have the opportunity to do that and to put the patient first and to build it right from the ground up, it's incredibly exciting, noted Hausmann. We'll build an environment that supports those state-of-the-art, high-tech processes.

The campus design also keeps in mind the outdoors environment surrounding the proposed campus, including rolling hills, water features, lush landscape and wooded areas. Its buildings will make abundant use of natural light, large windows and lookouts to make the hospital feel less like an ordinary hospital.

There's been a lot of research done about the healing environment and how that impacts patients as they're recovering from an illness. We'll take advantage of the natural beauty and take advantage of that research and offer our patients every opportunity to take advantage of a fully healing environment, said Hausmann. When you marry the healing environment with the technology with our very competent and friendly staff, we believe that we will be able to deliver exceptional health care.

Another advancement in this medical center will be a state-of-the- art, paperless information technology system to strengthen the quality of services, improve efficiencies and enhance patient safety.

Other amenities planned for the hospital and health care campus include:

- Spacious, all private rooms that offer convenient overnight accommodations for loved ones;

- One-stop convenience for a full range of outpatient services, such as lab, x-ray and other diagnostic services;

- An intelligent design that takes full advantage of the site's natural beauty, including gardens, fountains and other water features, courtyards and wooded areas; and

- Abundant parking close to all entrances and exits.

We intend to design the hospital of the future with a unique healing environment, inside and out, that embraces our patients and supports our staff with the ultimate in clinical excellence, safety, convenience and comfort, said Ronald J. Levy, president/CEO of SSM Health Care-St. Louis, in a statement.

When complete in the spring of 2008, the $215 million health care campus will replace SSM St. Joseph Hospital of Kirkwood. According to SSM representatives, SSM plans to work closely with Kirkwood leaders and residents to identify a new use for the current site that adds substantial value to the community.

SSM recently took the first step in gaining approval to build the hospital by filing a letter of intent with the state. A certificate of need application will be filed in January, which will be reviewed by the state-appointed Missouri Health Facilities Review Committee at its March 21 meeting.

If you look at what [SSM] has done over the past couple of years is invested in St. Charles County, they have invested in rebuilding Cardinal Glennon, and then we needed to figure out what to do with Kirkwood. We were constrained by the 18 acres here; the new site's 54 acres, paralleled Hausmann. We're right in the middle of a residential neighbor here [in Kirkwood], so it's been hard to figure out if we can expand in a 65-year-old building that is actually 12 separate buildings all added on to over the many years the hospital was here.