TOOELE — Residents frustrated with medical services here are about to have a big reason to cheer.
The $20 million, 86,000-square-foot Mountain West Medical Center is near completion, poised to replace a 50-year-old facility that is past its prime.
"It looks every bit 50 years old," said Eric Rose, business development director for the Nashville-based Community Health Care Systems, owner of the new hospital.
For years the old Tooele Valley Medical Center operated more as an emergency room and less as a full-service hospital.
It didn't have the best reputation, Rose said, and without private rooms and a lot of the amenities patients have come to expect in hospitals, people routinely sought health care in Salt Lake City instead. The new hospital, located on the city's north side, will include surgery and in-patient rooms, a labor and delivery room, a full-time radiologist and an ear/nose/throat specialist.
"You're giving the folks in Tooele a viable option now," said Layton Construction spokesman Alan Rindlisbacher. He projected a completion date of May 1.
Layton has built hospitals in other rural environs such as Beaver, Kanab and Nephi. Though a still-growing Tooele — with about 25,000 people — is much larger than those cities, it's still valued for its rural appeal by the handful of physicians who have been recruited to staff the new hospital, according to Rose. That environment, along with being located near a major city, has become an attraction for eight new physicians.
"So, you kind of get the best of both worlds there," Rose said.
Community Health Care Systems, which owns 57 hospitals across the country, took over management of the old hospital and eventually bought it outright from Tooele County in October 2000, for between $3 million and $4 million. The first agenda item was to make $1 million in improvements to the roughly 30,000-square-foot relic.
Now, the old building and an attached 27,000-square-foot nursing home are owned by Salt-Lake based Rocky Mountain Care, which bought the two facilities for less than $2 million. Adam Paul, a spokesman for the company, said they're "crunching numbers" to decide whether to keep the buildings, renovate the old hospital and expand the nursing home or build an entirely new facility somewhere else in the community.
Being built directly behind the new hospital is a 20,000-square-foot medical offices building, which will house several physicians. There's also an additional five acres behind the hospital for future expansion.
Rose predicted the new medical center may even lure patients from the Salt Lake Valley.
"We'll be able to serve patients better and faster" than the old hospital, he said. "Once patients realize they can get a procedure done in a matter of days, that becomes the appealing option" to waiting much longer for the same procedure elsewhere.
Hospital operations should begin moving into the new digs around May 13, with patient move-in scheduled for May 17.
E-MAIL: sspeckman@desnews.com