PMH Breaks New Ground
Official: Page Memorial To Enter Modern Era
Posted: December 11, 2012
Valley Health President and CEO Mark H. Merrill speaks at a groundbreaking ceremony for the new Page Memorial Hospital in Luray on Monday. (Photos by Stephen Mitchell)
Page Memorial Hospital President Travis Clark points to the area where the new hospital will sit during a groundbreaking ceremony on Monday. The facility will have 25 beds and contemporary care.
The three-story, 67,100-square-foot hospital is being built on the same Luray campus, at 200 Memorial Drive, as the current hospital but on a different plot.
The groundbreaking ceremony had been scheduled for Nov. 1 but was postponed due to Hurricane Sandy.
“It’s not very often that a $38 million project is launched in Page County,” said Travis Clark, president of Page Memorial Hospital. “I’m very proud to be standing here today with this group of exceptional people.”
Winchester-based Valley Health System, which owns PMH, will invest $37 million in the project.
An effort to raise the remaining $1 million for hospital equipment was launched by two Luray residents, Cathy Weaver and Susan Dees, who co-chair the PMH Capital Campaign Committee.
“We invite all who cherish our hospital and believe in its mission to support and participate in this critical effort,” Dees said during the ceremony.
The $1 million will pay for new hospital beds with built-in alarms and scales, radiology equipment, upgraded digital mammography and ultrasound technology.
Mark H. Merrill, president and chief executive officer of Valley Health System, said the new facility will bring Page Memorial Hospital into the modern era of health care.
The current hospital was built in 1958 and expanded in 1999.
Merrill said that the older design is more suited to inpatient needs, while the new hospital will be geared toward outpatient services. In recent years, updated technology has rendered many procedures, tests and surgeries less invasive and less likely to require patients to stay overnight.
The number of hospital beds, 25, will remain the same, though all rooms will be private and larger. Only nine rooms in the current facility are private.
When the project was first being considered, Merrill said, the estimated cost to renovate the current structure and retrofit it with new technology came to around $18 million. New construction, he said, was clearly the better option.
Once the new facility opens in early 2014, most of the current hospital building will be demolished and the space used as a parking lot. Merrill said the only portion that may remain is the 1999 expansion, which would be used for administrative offices.
Contact Kaitlin Mayhew at 574-6290 or kmayhew@dnronline.com