Specialty Surgical Hospital to serve Sussex
By Tim MastroREHOBOTH BEACH — Beebe Healthcare is set to complete a three-year expansion project, capped off by the opening of its Specialty Surgical Hospital in May — the first hospital of its kind in Delaware.
The $125 million, 135,000-square-foot facility was completed ahead of schedule and will open its doors at 5:30 a.m. Monday, May 16. It is located between Lewes and Rehoboth Beach along Warrington Road and a newly-constructed road named Healthy Way.
A recent Delaware law change allowed for the construction of specialty surgical hospitals and Beebe’s will be the first hospital designated as such. Previously, any hospital built needed to have an emergency room in the facility.
“The focus here is on providing elective surgeries,” Beebe CEO Dr. David Tam said during a tour of the new facility on Monday. “People choose to come here and get the surgery by their doctors and then they want to go home. They want to go home as soon as possible and that’s what this place is all about.”
The hospital will have 150 employees and house 24 rooms for overnight stays, 18 pre- and post-operative care rooms, a lab, X-ray and CAT scan rooms, a cafeteria and a chapel. The third floor also contains a therapy room where patients can practice walking up and down stairs, and getting in and out of a car after their surgery.
Beebe’s walk-in care clinic will also move to the facility in the summer which should increase capacity by 30%, Dr. Tam said. He added the fourth floor of the new building is currently a “shell” — empty for now but to be used for future expansion.
“It really gives the metropolitan-type hospital feel in the community setting,” said Regina Newell, a registered nurse who was involved in the design process for the facility.
The hospital finishes an expansion plan announced three years ago that also included its South Coastal Health campus, which has a cancer center and an emergency department in Millville, and renovations to its Margaret H. Rollins Lewes Campus.
“We’ve looked at how to really do everything possible to serve our growing and evolving community,” Dr. Tam said. “Sussex County is growing, not just in numbers, but also evolving, changing and the demographics are changing. So it’s really important for Beebe Healthcare to grow and evolve with it in order to be able to provide that kind of service. That’s what this place is all about. It’s about being welcoming. It’s about being open. It’s about being able to demonstrate that we are bringing advanced and innovative care to Sussex County, so you don’t have to leave Sussex County to get that level of care.”
Dr. Gita Pillai, chief of Beebe’s orthopedics division, said the new hospital will allow the health system to streamline care, thanks to added space and technology.
“This hospital will allow us to be so much more efficient,” Dr. Pillai said. “It’s going to allow us to care for more people in a shorter amount of time, which is a huge issue here since our population has exploded.”
Beebe designed the building with help from a patient family advisory council. This council determined what colors and textures should be used to make the visit less anxious for the patient.
Artwork featuring local landmarks, from Lewes to Bethany Beach, are scattered throughout the building and windows are specifically designed to bring in more light to patient rooms. The third floor has distance markers to give recovering patients an understanding of how far they have walked.
“We actually asked patients, family, visitors and staff to have everybody involved in what they would want this to be,” Ms. Newell said. “We added the art, music and we really went into every detail of the patient room, or the operating room, really just everything we could think of, to make it a great experience for our patients.”
Dr. Tam said the new facility will help with recruiting new physicians to address Sussex County’s growing population.
“When I call and recruit them, they say they never thought about coming to Southern Delaware, but when they see the kind of work that we have done to build this world-class facility they think twice,” Dr. Tam said. “They say, ‘I would like to come work in a place like that, and oh, it’s also by the beach and it’s also a nice place to live.’ I think that that’s going to be a huge draw for physicians to want to come here and work in a place like this.”
Dr. Tam added Beebe won’t be slowing down its expansion plans.
Once the new hospital opens, Beebe will begin renovations on its Center for Breast Health and Tunnell Cancer Center. Dr. Tam said Beebe is also going to be breaking ground on a property in Milton for a medical office and work is starting on another office building in Milford.
He added Beebe is also looking for more opportunities for construction in Millville as that area expands and to provide more support to its medical education programs, both a residency program scheduled to start in summer 2023 and current medical students from Philadelphia who do rotations at Beebe.
“We are marching forward into the future of Sussex County,” Dr. Tam said. “There’s a lot going on here, a lot of exciting things as we grow.”
