Hannah S. Welles held a shovel at the 1897 groundbreaking of Hahnemann Hospital.
On Monday, her great-grandson Dorrance Belin, 75, Waverly Twp., held a shovel, this time announcing an $80 million, multiyear renovation and expansion project at what is now Geisinger Community Medical Center, the same hospital where he was born.
He and other officials symbolically broke ground on the project at GCMC, which will include 14 state-of-the art operating rooms, a 950-square-foot waiting room and 18 private rooms in the intensive care unit. The 105,000-square-foot expansion will update the current operating rooms and intensive care unit, built in 1967.
As part of its July 2011 agreement with Community Medical Center and its affiliated facilities, Geisinger Health System pledged to invest $158.6 million in capital improvements at the hospital over the next seven years. This project represents part of that commitment.
"I felt very proud about it, especially because the beneficiaries of all of this will be the residents of Scranton and the Greater Lackawanna area," said Mr. Belin, a 34-year board member, whose great-grandmother Margaretta E. Belin also helped found Hahnemann.
Last year, about 27,000 patients traveled out of the Luzerne and Lackawanna area to receive services that GCMC could not provide, said Glenn Steele Jr., M.D., Ph.D., the president and chief executive officer of Geisinger Health System.
Patients will be able to see improvements to the waiting rooms and entrances, but anesthesia will limit their views of the operating rooms, he joked.
"They won't get to see it, but they'll benefit from it," he said.
Geisinger expects the project to be completed in the summer of 2015 and estimated adding 200 jobs to the current staff of more than 1,500. Planning began more than a year ago, said GCMC Chief Medical Officer Anthony Aquilina, D.O.
"Now we're just thrilled it's finally going to happen," he said.
As for the construction time frame, he added, "Two years goes fast."
He looks forward to expanding services, including advanced neurosurgical procedures such as brain mapping.
"That technology doesn't exist in Scranton right now," he said at Monday's groundbreaking.
The additions will build on the success the facility already achieved, hospital CEO Robert Steigmeyer said.
The hospital, Lackawanna County's only certified Primary Stroke Center, reduced the mean time for heart attack intervention from 78 minutes in 2011 to 58 minutes today, he said.
"The bottom line is this is saving people's lives," Mr. Steigmeyer said.
GCMC already began adding staff members and preparing the hospital to expand, he said.
"We didn't wait for construction to begin to evolve our clinical programs," he said. "It's all pulsed. We're making steps every day to advance care."
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