by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | July 23, 2021
From the July 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
This series of four photographs document some of the expansion progress taking place at Fairfield Memorial, which came underway in 2020.
HCB News: How has the pandemic impacted the expansion?
KB: There were some variables that had an impact. The first, the costs of supplies — it ended up being a blessing for us, but not so much for our construction crew. Our contract is a lump sum price for the build. So as things started going up, those costs aren’t cost-shifted back to us. I would not be able to start a project today because of the cost.
One blessing of being in the early stages of this project was that I had maybe five negative pressure rooms built into our new expansion. Once we found out that the COVID virus is respiratory-driven and requires negative pressure rooms for best treatments, we knew then that every room in the ER that the state allows to be, would be negative pressure. We have nine now.
This series of four photographs document some of the expansion progress taking place at Fairfield Memorial, which came underway in 2020.
HCB News: Other than the expansion, how hard did COVID hit your area and how are you faring currently?
KB: We were fortunate at the beginning to have time to observe and absorb the lessons of what hospitals in large metropolitan areas were experiencing. It gave us the opportunity to get our plans in place, to write our policies, to gear up our employees. We were hit hard with the surge starting in September. We ended up having two COVID units — one on our third and one on our second floor. At any given time, we had seven to 19 patients with COVID. We had 67 deaths during that surge, which is a lot considering we’re a small county, but we have several nursing homes in the area and the majority were patients from those homes and the pandemic impacted that population hard.
HCB News: As a small hospital, not having the power of economy of scale, were supplies difficult to obtain?
