Grandview Hospital officially open
Grandview Medical Center is officially open for business.
At 5:50 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 10, Grandview treated its first emergency room patient. Shortly after, at around 7 a.m., the first of the 98 patients transferred from Trinity Medical Center arrived.
Chief Administrative Officer Paul Graham said the move went as well as planned, if not better.
After 14 months of planning for the move, Graham said it was the care and attentiveness of the staff that made the move go as well as it did.
One of those staff members, Neonatal ICU nurse Barbara Lee, was in the first group of ambulances to make the move. Lee helped transport the four infants in the Trinity NICU to the state-of-the-art facilities at Grandview.
“All of our babies did well, they all transported fine with no kind of problems or anything,” Lee said.
Lee said she and the other nurses have been preparing for the move for the last six months, but that traveling with a police escort was something she has never experienced.
“I’ve been a nurse for 19 years, and I’ve been a NICU nurse for 17, and this is by far the craziest thing I’ve ever been a part of,” Lee said.
Lee said she and her team are very excited about the Grandview facilities, especially the ability for parents to stay in the same room as their child.
“We have some of the top technology that I’ve ever seen,” Lee said.
Dr. Jeremy Rogers, who was present at Grandview when the first patient arrived Saturday morning, said everything went very smoothly for the first day.
“I think it’s been a testament of the hard work everybody’s put in over the past year,” Rogers said. “There have been no major hiccups in our plan.”
Rogers said he couldn’t be more proud of the emergency department and the advanced technology and equipment in the new facility.
Graham also said he is pleased with the new facilities, but that it’s the people that work at Grandview he thinks will make an impact.
“Everyone realize, we’re moving into this nice shiny building on the 280 corridor but there’s a lot more substance to us than just the flash of that building,” Graham said. “I think people are going to be very pleased with what we bring to that area.”