The new hospital at southern Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood will open its doors in just over four months.
The army base announced Monday that the new General Leonard Wood Community Hospital will open on April 7th. Colonel Angela Diebal-Lee is the hospital’s commanding officer.
“We have orthopedic services up and running, (and) we’ll have that department fully staffed with two orthopedic surgeons and two orthopedic PA’s by the time we move into the new facility,” Diebal-Lee told Missourinet. “General surgery is up and running, OBGYN, internal medicine – we will have a better complement of our staff at the new facility because we have several hiring actions in place. So that’s pretty exciting.”
The new hospital will also have some new amenities, including children’s waiting area and a coffee bar.
Diebal-Lee also told Missourinet that the layout of the new hospital will be greatly improved.
“(The new hospital is) only on three floors versus six, and things aren’t scattered throughout all six floors. So essentially, they lay everything out, so everything complements each other,” she said. “So physical therapy is next to occupational therapy, which is next to chiro(practic), you know, all those things are laid out to make better sense.”
The new hospital will have the same number of beds, 44, as the current one. But it will also have a “more robust” telehealth footprint.
“We have the ability to ‘phone a friend,’” Diebal-Lee said. “So we are working with the Naval Medical Center and basically, we click a button, we get them on the video. They can watch the patient’s chest rise and fall. They can see the monitor, everything, like they were in the room and they can provide that extra layer of service for our staff.”
At one time, the Defense Health Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense had considered downgrading Ft. Leonard Wood’s hospital to a clinic as a cost-saving measure.
Maj. Gen. Christopher Beck, Ft. Leonard Wood’s commander, said they were able to make persuasive arguments to keep the base hospital a fully functioning medical center. One of those arguments that won the debate — the hospital’s ER ward includes decontamination capabilities that other nearby hospitals lack.
“It just took some education,” Beck said. “We got great support from senior leaders, including the Surgeon General, that helped us educate Army senior leaders and Dept. of War senior leaders on why this was a critical capability to our community at large.”
Meanwhile, the current hospital building’s warehouse, gym, and optical fabrication works will still be used, while the rest of the older building will be torn down to make room for a new parking lot.
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