Hospital plans major project
$3m gift to help fund new emergency room
Newton-Wellesley Hospital hopes to embark on a $60 million building project, the most expensive in the hospital's 123-year history.
To help fund it, the hospital announced the biggest single gift it has ever received, $3 million from the family of the late Maxwell Blum, founder of the
A new emergency department, the key component of the project, will be named for Blum.
The expansion, which requires approval from the city of Newton, follows a decade of construction. New wings have been added and old ones renovated in response to the increased demands of an aging population and the consolidation of hospitals statewide.
"There are times in the life of an institution when it takes a giant leap," said Joan Archer, the hospital's vice president of development. "I think this is one of those times."
The current emergency department, built in the 1950s and last renovated in 1987, is designed to accommodate 28,000 annual visits. Last year, the hospital registered 42,000 visits, and 281 ambulance runs had to be diverted to other hospitals.
"We're challenged by our successes," said Dr. Mark Lemons, chairman of the emergency department. "If you're used to seeing 110 patients a day and now you have to see 125, you can recruit staff but you can't build new rooms tomorrow. And then it turned out that we had no parking. When we saw all this happening, we knew we had to start planning."
Officials from the hospital two weeks ago applied for a permit to begin construction; a public hearing is scheduled for Jan. 11, after which the city will have 90 days to make a decision on the project. Hospital officials hope to break ground on the new department by the summer, which would mean it would be completed in early 2007. It would be nearly triple the size of the existing facility.
The $29.7 million proposal calls for the new emergency department to be built behind the hospital, adding two floors above the existing Wikstrom Surgical Center, which was built just eight years ago. The emergency department would include 37 treatment rooms -- nearly double what it now has -- and two rooms equipped for emergency surgeries. It would also have eight pediatric treatment rooms and four rooms designated for "fast-track" patients who are admitted for minor ailments such as a sore throat.
Bedside registration would be offered to get patients into treatment rooms sooner. The average waiting time for treatment at Newton-Wellesley right now is 55 minutes on weekdays and 90 minutes on weekends. The overall national average is 56 minutes.
The new emergency department will be called the Maxwell Blum Emergency Pavilion in honor the founder of the Maxwell Shoe Co. who died at the hospital last year. His widow, Eleanor Blum, donated $3 million to the hospital last spring, but the gift was just made public. Maxwell Shoes, which was launched in 1949, was purchased last summer by the Pennsylvania-based
The proposed $21.8 million parking garage would provide some 560 parking spaces. Hospital officials have said the garage is needed because of a shift that began in the late 1990s toward more outpatient care. Currently, patients and the 1,000 member staff have to make do with 1,764 spaces. The new garage would have five levels, two of them below ground, and would be located in the back of the hospital.
Neighbors have raised concerns that the garage would draw more traffic to their already congested neighborhood, which is also near the Woodland MBTA stop.
The two new projects reflect the transformation of Newton-Wellesley from a large community hospital into a regional center for health care. The hospital is often overshadowed by its Boston sisters, but its convenience and growing services are making it more appealing for suburbanites. It is about a mile from the Massachusetts Turnpike, just off of Interstate 95, and serves patients as far south as Foxborough and as far north as Bedford. The closing of Waltham Hospital in July 2003 sent hundreds of new patients to Newton-Wellesley, Lemons said.
To keep up, the hospital two years ago added a separate pediatric area, the Vinik Pediatric Emergency Room. This year, the hospital expanded its maternity services to give it the largest obstetrics program west of Boston, with a capacity to deliver 4,000 babies a year. Hospital officials said that, after the new emergency department is built, they hope to use its old quarters for a new cancer center that will offer chemotherapy.
Newton-Wellesley is part of the Partners HealthCare System, which also runs Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's, and Faulkner hospitals.
The new emergency room will be built to accommodate 55,000 annual visits. Mass. General last year handled 75,000, according to the American Hospital Association. Outside of Boston, though, Newton-Wellesley has one of the busiest emergency rooms, along with MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham, which had 69,000 visits last year.
Matt Viser can be contacted at viser@globe.com.
