No fooling: April 1 groundbreaking for Columbia County hospital marks important milestone

Columbia County’s first hospital officially broke ground Monday, but its positive impact on the region and state is no April Fool’s joke, the new president of Wellstar MCG Health said.

“As medical practitioners we understand that someone’s ability to access health care directly impacts their well-being, but there’s so much more to it,” said Ralph Turner, senior vice president and hospital president at Wellstar MCG Health. “It’s how we deliver care.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and former Gov. Sonny Perdue, chancellor of the University System Board of Regents, topped the list of local and state officials who turned the first ceremonial shovels of dirt at the end of Gateway Boulevard in Grovetown. Though the ceremony occurred Monday, site work and vertical construction on the hospital has been underway for months.

For several years, Columbia County has been Georgia’s most populous county without a full-service hospital.

When completed, Wellstar Columbia County Medical Center will span about 250,000 square feet, the size of more than four football fields. Its emergency department will house a Level II trauma center, which offers definitive 24-hour treatment for sudden injuries. The closest Level II to Augusta is in Athens at Piedmont Athens Regional.

Neighboring the hospital will be a 90,000-square-foot office building whose occupants will focus on women’s health and other specialties for what Turner called a “patient-focused medical office building for all of Columbia County’s residents and neighboring communities.”

'There's a lot to do': Medical College of Georgia dean reveals ambitious future for school

The hospital’s 100 patient rooms will be “acuity-adaptable,” meaning the rooms are designed to more efficiently bring care to a patient instead of transporting a patient to different in-hospital care sites. Other hospitals have used the strategy to combat overcrowding.

Wellstar Columbia also likely will be the one of the last hospitals in Georgia to have gained certification under the state’s disputed certificate-of-need program. The program requires anyone wanting to establish a hospital in Georgia to prove the community’s need for a hospital by applying for a certificate of need, which is vetted then approved or denied by the Georgia Department of Community Health.

The program began more than 50 years ago as a means to control health care costs. Critics of the program have said that it exerts bureaucratic overreach over a process that instead discourages free enterprise.

Recently passed state legislation, now headed to the governor’s desk for likely signature into law, aims to reduce the red tape. Kemp said Monday that the anticipated new law is just “a cog in the wheel” of the continuing movement toward creating and hiring medical professionals, and filling Georgians' myriad health needs. As the home of the state’s oldest publicly funded medical school, Augusta is entrenched in that battle.

“That’s why the legislature and the local delegation here has been funding residency slots, nursing programs, allied health. It’s not just the hospital piece and the medical doctor piece. There’s a whole ecosystem of people that we’ve got to get prepared to serve the needs of our state,” Kemp said. “We’re growing, thankfully. We have great opportunity here. That’s certainly the case in the CSRA. One piece of legislation’s not going to change that, and we’ll continue to work every day and every year to build that ecosystem.”

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Wellstar Columbia County Medical Center breaks ground near Grovetown