Marion General Hospital unveils renovated dialysis and women’s health units

OhioHealth’s Marion General Hospital’s nursing staff gathered alongside members of its leadership team on the floor of the newly opened 2 South Unit Tuesday morning, celebrating the completion of the second phase of $46 million renovation plan that launched in 2018.

After opening its doors April 4, the updated unit, which cares for hemo-dialysis patients, is opening alongside the completion of renovations to the Women’s Health Unit, which remained open through the construction.

The completion of these renovations is a testament to the hard work of everyone involved, including the hospital’s nursing teams, executive leadership, construction crews and designers, Senior Director of Nursing Jamie Cunningham said.

Marion General’s Director of Nursing, Inpatient Services and Women’s Health, Charity Coffman explained some of these challenges to be supply-chain delays related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the stress of working through construction.

Coffman also pointed out that the hospital’s dialysis patients become a part of the unit’s “family” due to the chronic nature of dialysis care, adding to the importance of the updated unit: patients spend a lot of time there.

“The rooms themselves are amazing. We used to have two patients in those rooms, so to be able to make them private and then enlarge the bathroom capacity with a full-size shower and the plumbing, is huge,” Coffman said.

The newly renovated rooms were specifically created to provide state-of-the-art care to these individuals, with larger, private bathrooms, floors engineered to be safer in the event of falls, larger doors to accommodate special needs and updated calling system to communicate with the nursing staff.

The second of three phases of the hospital’s Master Facilities Plan for renovations, the completion of this renovation project follows the opening of an updated endoscopy unit and the 3-story, 60,000 square foot east wing which opened in January 2021.

Story continues

This new wing was the first phase of privatization and brought 48 private rooms to Marion’s hospital. The opening of the updated units are now a continuation of this project, creating an additional 19 privatized rooms.

The renovated women’s health unit will have a new labor and delivery room, a new triage room, new nursing stations and a security system to lock access to the unit from non-staff members.

It is also equipped with the new calling system and the Hugs baby monitoring system to safely monitor the hospital’s 950 babies born each year on average. The hospital is also hiring two new OBGYN’s along with this renovation to the women’s health unit.

Communications & Media Relations Manager Jill Fazekas said that through privatizing its rooms, the hospital can provide a higher level of care, and people do not have to leave Marion to receive top-notch medical services.

“Our goal is to take the whole hospital private. We know that’s what our patients want. It’s really important for them, and we want to give them that experience. This was a huge step for a community hospital,” Fazekas said.

The third phase of privatization is reopening the Surgical Unit with private rooms. The surgery teams transitioned to their temporary unit Tuesday in order to allow the construction crew to begin its work on the third-phase renovation project.

Construction on this unit is scheduled to conclude this upcoming summer before the opening of the $20 million cancer center which is on track to open in the fall.

Story by: Sophia Veneziano (740) 564 – 5243 | sveneziano@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Marion Star: Marion General Hospital unveils renovated units