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Sacred Heart plans $175 million expansion

John Stucke
Staff writer
September 18, 2008

Sacred Heart Medical Center plans to spend $175 million over five years on an expansion project that will add 173 new patient beds and reshape the hospital campus.

The building plans promise to buoy the local construction industry as the hospital becomes the largest in the state with 796 licensed beds, according to licensed bed tallies from the Washington State Hospital Association.

Sacred Heart has been bustling with record numbers of patients. Its emergency room is on pace to treat 76,000 patients this year – far in excess of the 45,000 seen four years ago.

The average daily patient count is 530. That’s an 85 percent occupancy rate that has forced the hospital to divert patients to other medical centers.

Mike Wilson, president of the hospital, said expansion plans were hatched 17 months ago to ensure the region’s leading medical center could meet the needs of patients from a growing base of referring physicians.

On one August day the hospital had 552 patients and 61 scheduled surgeries – busy but hardly unusual during a string of months that have left the state’s hospitals wondering where to put people.

“We are essentially full,” said Dr. Andrew Agwunobi, chief executive of Providence Health Care, which oversees Sacred Heart.

Cranes and workers will add four floors to Sacred Heart’s west wing beginning in mid-2009, Wilson said. The emergency department will sprawl outward and then be topped with two additional floors.

And a 100,000-square-foot medical office building and cancer center is being designed.

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