A 20-foot steel beam soars through the air above Santa Maria’s Marian Medical Center, the summer sun reflecting off it like light off a mirror. Perched atop it are an evergreen tree and an American flag.
There’s no need for psychoanalysis—this isn’t a dream loaded with strange symbolism, it’s the hospital’s official “topping off” ceremony held on June 11. During the event, construction workers placed the last beam in the structural frame of Marian’s new facility.
“It’s tradition for steelworkers to put an evergreen tree and a flag on the final beam,” explained hospital representative Jessa Squellati as the assembled crowd stared up into the sky. “We added our own banner, too.”
Slated for completion in fall 2011, the new addition will double Marian’s overall size to approximately 216,000 square feet and offer 188 beds with private patient rooms, an expanded emergency services department and critical care unit, and a state-of-the-art Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The facility will also boast a new cafeteria, expanded waiting rooms, and a healing garden.
“The new hospital is designed with patients in mind,” Marian’s president and CEO Chuck Cova said during the ceremony. “It goes beyond services. It’s really about the environment.”
Providing patients with private rooms (and private bathrooms), Cova said, will “have a tremendous effect on the patients’ ability to heal.”
Those therapeutic benefits will also be in the hospital’s new emergency services department, where patients will be able to receive treatment in secluded rooms.
“The privacy is a really huge thing because you don’t have to worry about just a curtain being there,” explained emergency room doctor Al Schultz. “It’s crucial, especially when taking people’s history, because they might be hesitant to talk if they’re worried that someone is right outside.”
Those rooms will also be equipped with their own X-ray and MRI machines to improve efficiency and medical response time inside the emergency services department.
For the hospital’s youngest and most at-risk patients, there will be a new Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, designed to provide local families with a quiet healing environment.
“We’re going to be able to take care of the babies that we usually have to transfer out to [other hospitals],” perinatal services director Marilyn Propst said. “And we’re going to be able to keep families together with their babies.”
Developing and constructing a new Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU, is such an all-consuming endeavor that the hospital hired a NICU expert.
“Developing and running a NICU involves every single department of the hospital to provide the proper care to the babies,” Marian’s neonatal clinical nurse specialist Mary Richards said. “Pharmacy, caseworkers, pastoral, social workers, X-ray—everything.”
“[Babies] require the same types of care as everybody else, just in different sizes,” added hospital CEO and president Cova.
And none of these medical improvements or facility upgrades, Cova said, would have been possible without the generosity of people living in the Santa Maria community.
Just prior to the “topping off” ceremony, the Marian Medical Center Foundation announced that $13.7 million has been raised to date to build the new hospital. The Marian Foundation Cornerstone Campaign set a goal of $15 million to go toward the project’s $210-million price tag.
According to foundation officials, the money has been accumulating over the last three years and is made up of more than 300 gifts in donations and pledges.
Some major contributors include the estate of Marian Mullin Hancock (for whom the facility’s lobby will be named), the estate of Irving and Dadi Souza, Mark and Dorothy Smith, and the family of John J. Will. The Santa Barbara Foundation and the city of Santa Maria also made donations.
“This has really been a collaborative effort of the community. Construction of the facility has been a dream of many people for a long time,” Cova said. “We’re ready to transition from the old facility—which has served the community well for over 60 years—and into the new one.”
Contact Staff Writer Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 18-25, 2009.