By CHRISTIN COYNE
Weatherford Regional Medical Center’s new CEO, David Orcutt, introduced himself to the Parker County Hospital District board of directors Thursday afternoon and updated them on various projects the hospital is pursuing.
Orcutt, the CEO of Community Health System’s Granbury hospital, who began in Weatherford last month, said they have many projects in the works.
One of those projects is renovating portions of the hospital.
“We’re in the middle of deciding what we’re going to do with that second and third floor,” Orcutt said, adding that they have engaged an architectural firm out of Arlington.
“The walk-through we had done with them, they pretty much advised us that we’re going to be wiping those floors clean,” Orcutt said. “Sometimes they’ll like to reuse walls and keep the plumbing where it was, but just the size of the rooms and the layouts ... we just need to wipe it clean. Have a nice clean floor, outside walls and redesign from there.”
“We’re deciding what to do with those,” Orcutt said. “We’re considering really any kind of acute inpatient service.”
They are looking at the need in the county for services, according to Orcutt.
“Some of these units we’re maxing out once in a while,” Orcutt said. “During the winter this year, we actually had to use a couple of the old rooms. We used them as privates and we’d renovated them before we got into them. We know we’re going to need a little more medical-surgical going on. We’re trying to look forward five years and see what we need as far as critical care ... or other [services].”
Another project is going a little faster, according to Orcutt.
They’ve engaged a local interior designer to redo the women’s services area of the hospital, addressing everything from the waiting area, patient rooms and bathrooms to the operating room if necessary.
They will also be re-equipping that department, Orcutt said. “Unless something was bought in the last year or two, it will all be tossed out.”
“Another neat project that we’re doing is we’ve been working for a couple months on a new medical office building over in the Park Cities complex where the ambulatory surgery center is,” Orcutt said. “That will be about 8,000-square-foot, and we’ve finished the floor plan design on that.”
They hope to break ground within about three months, according to Orcutt, who said they should see the center open in about a year.
“Most likely, it will be specialists [doctors] using that building,” Orcutt said.
Recruiting for neurology, endocrinology, primary care and urology hires are going well, according to Orcutt.
They’ve also nearly finished an employee survey, Orcutt said.
“Our overall satisfaction rate is coming back pretty good,” Orcutt said, adding that they’ve also gotten a lot of comments and data to help consider what they can change.
The hospital’s cardiac services have recently taken a step forward, Orcutt said.
On Feb. 18, Dr. Dennis Doan and Dr. G.R. Reddy and the team in the cath lab at the hospital moved from doing diagnostic work to interventional services, such as putting a stent in, Orcutt said.
“That has really opened up the doctors’ ability to do more patients at the hospital,” Orcutt said, adding that they don’t have to send as many patients to Fort Worth for things such as stents.“The next step would be for us to start a STEMI call team that come here in the middle of the night and we’ll have a doctor there, a team there behind it to meet our 90-minute [required] times,” Orcutt said.
That was a big internal step, Orcutt said, adding that they will next start talking with EMS regarding STEMIs in a big community promotion of what the hospital’s capabilities are in dealing with heart attacks.
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