A $119 million expansion is in the works for Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center in Midlothian. (Image courtesy Bon Secours)
Bon Secours is poised for significant growth in 2021, with a $50 million expansion of the Memorial Regional Medical Center in Mechanicsville, as well as a $119 million expansion of the St. Francis Medical Center in Midlothian.
“There’s really a lot going on, on top of ambulatory investments and across the market,” says Chris Accashian, chief operating officer for Bon Secours in Richmond. “Richmond is a high-growth market. Most of that growth, like many communities, is in the 65-plus age cohort, which demands a lot more health care services. So we’re really preparing for what the next 10 to 20 years is going to bring us in Richmond.”
The expansion of Memorial Regional Medical Center includes buying a building previously occupied by Sheltering Arms and a renovation to include an additional 44 beds. The St. Francis Medical Center’s expansion will bring 55 additional beds, as well as a neonatal intensive care unit and mother-baby or postpartum beds. Also, Bon Secours is planning to build a free-standing emergency room with CT imaging services at an estimated cost of $2.6 million on the Chester campus of John Tyler Community College.
This growth builds on expansion in 2020 that included the acquisition of three hospitals: Southside Regional Medical Center in Petersburg, Southampton Memorial Hospital in Franklin and Southern Virginia Regional Medical Center in Emporia.
Opportunities for extending health career education are in the works at the health system’s two schools of nursing and its two schools of imaging, according to Accashian. “We’re working to expand the capacity of those schools and increase enrollment and class sizes,” he says. “We’ve always been looking for new ways to partner with the community college system to increase our capacity for practical rotations or folks in nursing school. There is a constant need of staff, and we’re working to increase the funnel and grow the pipeline of folks who want to be in health care.”
As COVID-19 raged in the past year, it shone a light on health systems, health care workers and health disparities, as well as the clear need for infrastructure changes such as the availability of negative-pressure rooms that are used to contain airborne contaminants.
Accashian notes that COVID-19 has accelerated virtual health care and telemedicine “10 years in about two months,” and much of that type of care will remain post-pandemic. This will free up in-hospital services, which will be needed to cope with trends that were evident even before the novel coronavirus struck. Accashian says that leadership’s decisions are based on the understanding that patients in hospitals are generally sicker than they have been in the past because advancements in medicine have allowed many more services to be done on an outpatient basis. “So the folks who really need to be in the hospital, whether it’s inpatient or otherwise, are going to be those who are sicker and require more of services,” he says.
Bon Secours Mercy Health was formed in 2018 through the merger of Maryland-based Bon Secours with Cincinnati-based Mercy Health. The combined health care system is one of the 20 largest in the United States and the fifth-largest Catholic health system in the country. More than 60,000 people work at Bon Secours Mercy Health facilities in Virginia, six other states and Ireland. The system served more than 10.5 million patients in 2018 through its network of more than 1,000 care sites, which includes hospitals, home health agencies, hospice, skilled nursing and assisted living facilities.
Accashian and his staff are also taking a look at modernizing and expanding St. Mary’s Hospital over the next couple of years.
He says the big projects underway focus on critical care.
“A lot of care that we provide historically in an inpatient setting or any surgeries that required a stay, a lot of it is moving to ambulatory,” Accashian says. “As we evolve from the hospital standpoint, that capacity is going to be primarily critical care, and in a more intense coverage. When it comes to growth, we always take the long view, looking 10 or 20 years into the future, because any of these projects take years to come from concept to operation, from a planning perspective, as well as the time it takes to get design and construction completed.”
