280Living.com
November 2015 • A13
Grandview Hospital officially open
Hospital staff unload patients at Grandview Medical Center Oct. 10. Photo by Emily Featherston.
By EMILY FEATHERSTON Grandview Medical Center is officially open for business. At 5:50 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 10, Grandview treated its first emergency room patient. Shortly after, at around 7 a.m., the first of the 98 patients transferred from Trinity Medical Center arrived. Chief Administrative Officer Paul Graham said the move went as well as planned, if not better, thanks to 14 months of planning and an attentive staff.
One of those staff members, Neonatal ICU nurse Barbara Lee, was in the first group of ambulances to make the move. Lee helped transport the four infants in the Trinity NICU to the state-of-the-art facilities at Grandview. “I’ve been a nurse for 19 years, and I’ve been a NICU nurse for 17, and this is by far the craziest thing I’ve ever been a part of,” Lee said. Dr. Jeremy Rogers, who was present at Grandview when the first patient arrived Saturday morning, said
everything went very smoothly for the first day. “I think it’s been a testament of the hard work everybody’s put in over the past year,” Rogers said, “There have been no major hiccups in our plan.” For the labor and delivery team at Grandview Medical Center, the first baby born in the new facility was also a new addition to the family. Meghan Elizabeth was born at 12:34 a.m. Sunday to Grandview labor and delivery nurse Tracy and her husband Joseph. Tracy was helping make
Meghan was the first baby born at Grandview, to one of the hospital’s labor and delivery nurses. Photo by Emily Featherston.
the move from Trinity Medical Center. As she was unpacking at Grandview, her contractions started to pick up. She said her fellow nurses noticed, and after putting her on a labor monitor decided to call her doctor and her husband. “We knew she would probably come early, just because, but we didn’t think it would be yesterday. My goal was to get through the move,” she said. Meghan wasn’t due until November. Even though it was earlier than planned, Tracy said that having her
friends as the ones taking care of her was comforting. Dr. Margaret Miklic, Tracy’s OBGYN, said it was “exciting and ironic” that the unit’s own charge nurse that had a role in moving patients all day Saturday was the first patient to have a baby at Grandview. “She had a beautiful delivery and it was a beautiful experience,” Miklic said. She said that “everything fell into place” in the new facility, and that she was honored to be a part of the hospital’s first birth.