Hospital open house

Yesterday, Sunday, the Jasper County Hospital had its open house to show off the renovated and newly constructed areas. People were not allowed to wander around and look for themselves. Everything was done with guided tours.

The first stop on the tour was the new outpatient area, which is in the old part of the hospital where the surgery units were previously. It has its own waiting area, which you can see through the doorway on the right.

The little cubicles look pretty much like the old ones. The old outpatient area is presently unassigned space. No decision has been made yet about what it will become.

Then we entered the newly constructed section. The main part of the upper level of the new addition is the surgery unit. It has four operating rooms. The whole area was closed to the tour--stray people might bring in unwanted microbes. Instead there was a video that showed what was inside. (The picture below was taken through the window in the door.) In addition to the operating rooms, there was a lot of space devoted to storage of supplies and equipment. I had a hard time following where they were in the video, but probably would also have had a hard time making sense of it if we had gone in. There are so many little rooms that the whole hospital is like a giant maze.

The MRI truck will no longer be parked out in front of the hospital. The new addition has a new MRI unit. The tour did not go into the room with the machine, but we could see it from the control room.

Then it was time to go to the lower level. This very comfortable-looking bedroom, one of two, is part of the sleep-study area. The hospital does a lot of sleep testing for truckers.

While the subjects are sleeping, there are monitored from this room.

Another unit in the lower level, one with windows, is the oncology unit. There were a number of the big chairs around a central nurses station.

The final stop before the cookies and punch in a conference room was hospital records. We did not get to go in there either, and there was not even a good view through the window.

The renovated and new units looked very nice. I hope I will not need to use them any time soon.