SANDY — Many residents here can mark the moment Sandy became a real city by the day that Alta View Hospital opened its doors.
With just 30 beds, the hospital boasted "airtight" relationships between doctors, staff, administrators and the surrounding community, said Linda Leckman, a vice president at Intermountain Healthcare who began her career as a surgeon at Alta View.
But after 34 years serving the southeast corner of Salt Lake Valley, the hospital is in need of "major surgery," in the words of Gordon Johnson, a Sandy resident and chairman of the Healthy Sandy community partnership.
Hospital officials broke ground Wednesday on a $94 million expansion expected to impact most of the hospital's major clinics over the next three years.
When completed, the newly expanded hospital will feature two additional patient towers, a Life Flight helipad and new specialties like podiatry and endocrinology.
In support of Intermountain Healthcare's mission of helping people live the healthiest lives possible, the new clinic will also house 27 family doctors — the largest concentration of primary care physicians in the health system, according to Leckman.
The expansion will also add new technologies like touch-screen white boards to enlarged patient rooms.
In honor of the hospital's new focus on cutting-edge technology, administrators asked students from four local high schools to design robots to break the ground for them Wednesday.
The students were given two weeks, which means Brighton High School senior Bodie Shane and the rest of the Bengal Robotics team spent a lot of time in their garage recently inventing a robot that can shovel dirt.
Forget spring break. "This is our fun," Shane said.
Some of the expansion will make the design of the hospital less awkward by moving the main campus drive and bringing parking areas closer to the entrances.
The InstaCare currently located on 700 East will be moved onto the campus directly across from the emergency room, according to Leckman.
The hospital's unusual setup and distinctive triangular buildings are a vestige of its humble beginnings as a narrow strip of sloped land that the then-mayor offered to sell at a "price that couldn't be refused," according to Johnson.
Back then, he said, the city numbered just 10,000 residents and the hospital was "a hillside of sand and sagebrush."
"State officials didn't believe a hospital as far out in the boondocks could be justified," Johnson said.
But the ’70s and ’80s brought a building boom and rush of young families looking for a place outside the city to raise children.
Mayor Tom Dolan said the expansion is a necessary upgrade for a community that now numbers more than 91,100 residents and is growing steadily.
“We’re coming into the phase where younger families are arriving and children are coming in,” Dolan said.
"After 34 years, it's time to refurbish," he added.
Email: dchen@deseretnews.com
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