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HMHP to Outline Expansion Plans for its Hospitals
BOARDMAN, Ohio – Humility of Mary Health Partners will announce expansion plans for its three Mahoning Valley hospitals in the next few weeks, a system official said Tuesday.
The staff of Humility of Mary, which operates St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown, St. Joseph Health Center in Warren and its newest medical campus, St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center here, is working on a master facility plan for the three hospitals, reported Paul Olivier, senior vice president of business development/quality officer.
“Because of the high demand for this facility and quality of services that we provide, we're looking to essentially double the size of the [Boardman] facility,” he said.
“We’ve had a very positive from the community here in Boardman and the surrounding areas,” remarked Genie Aubel, president of St. Elizabeth Boardman. “We are a 128-bed facility and during the peak portions of the year, primarily the winter months, we have had as many as 150 patients here – admitted patients – so clearly there is demand in this part of the community for additional beds.”
Aubel and Olivier declined to provide further details on the expansion plans, deferring to the formal announcement to come in a few weeks.
The expansion won’t be the first for the St. Elizabeth Boardman campus, which opened in August 2007. The 17-bed emergency department expanded to 30 beds nearly two years ago. That expansion was due to demand, which continues to grow, Aubel said. In fact, volume is growing across the board.
“If you look at the community, the population is growing down here, housing has grown, physician office presence in this area has grown and likewise demand for health services in this area has grown as well,” she explained.
Humility of Mary’s growth plans were among the topics discussed during a visit to the Boardman campus Wednesday by U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson, R-6 Ohio. Johnson visited the hospital to recognize the nursing staff as part of the upcoming commemoration of National Nurses Week, May 6-12, and to discuss health-care issues in general, Olivier said.
The congressman, interviewed following a tour and a luncheon meeting with Humility of Mary administrators, said he is visiting health-care centers “up and down” the 6th District. “Health care is a big issue on everybody’s mind” -- those who provide it as well as those who receive it – “so we were talking to people about what their issues are, what their concerns are,” he remarked. The challenges providers like Humility of Mary face include shrinking reimbursements, a $500 billion cut to Medicare included as part of the health-care law enacted in 2010, and concerns about access to quality health care, he said.
“You’ve got one in three health-care providers that are restricting or limiting the number of Medicare patients that they’re seeing because of this onerous health-care law,” he remarked.
Johnson also commented on a proposed rule by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that he said would put companies that produce manganese ferroalloy, a critical raw material used in steel manufacturing, out of business. On Monday, Johnson and U.S. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-2 W.Va., sent a letter to the EPA’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, calling on her to reconsider the rule. One of the two U.S. companies that produces manganese is in Marietta.
“The rule that they’re trying to release is technologically and scientifically unfounded,” and the cost to comply with the mandate is so “onerous” that the two companies would have to shut down, Johnson said, forcing the United States to purchase manganese “from our adversaries and our competitors overseas.”
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.