Trinity Hospital on track for January completion, April move-in

By Andrew Weeks

Dusty Zimmerman, director at Trinity Health Foundation, is excited about what the next few months will bring.

In January the medical campus, which includes a new hospital and medical office building – a combined $561 million project – will be completed and in April the facilities will open. Those few months will be a busy time for the staff at Trinity, Zimmerman said, but it also will be an exciting time moving into a more spacious and modern medical campus.

“We’ll take that time from January to April to move equipment – and there’s a lot of equipment,” she said. “For instance, in the lab area, that needs to be acclimated to a new space – and it will take several months to do that before it can be utilized for patient care. And so those few months will give us the opportunity to do those things.”

Also involved is training staff on new processes. But with the size of the project, a lot of planning has gone into making sure everything goes smoothly when moving day arrives.

The new Trinity Hospital will be 594,000 square feet and the medical office building is 196,000 square feet, located on a 43-acre campus. Once completed, it will be a much-needed addition to the Minot community, Zimmerman said.

The current hospital’s emergency department is located off “the second busiest street in town,” Zimmerman said, noting the new hospital’s emergency area will be larger, more accessible, and will have a garage to house ambulances, an added boon especially during inclement weather.

The garage and ambulances will use technology that will prompt doors to open when an ambulance drives up to the entrance.

“It will just be much more pleasant for patients who are arriving to us by ambulance,” Zimmerman said. “Also in that regard, our helicopter pad currently is on the top of the building and utilizes an elevator to get down to the emergency room. With the building being 100 years old, sometimes that elevator has issues and it just isn’t an ideal situation.

“Now, at the new hospital, the helicopter pad is located adjacent to the building with a straight shot right into the emergency room. Those moments in a critical situation are all key, and so it just makes the process more efficient getting those patients to where they need to be as quickly as possible.”

As for the size of the new emergency department, it will be about triple the size of the current space.

“That’s one thing that we’re super excited about,” Zimmerman said. “The current facility was constructed to see about 35 patients a day – and we’re currently seeing about 100 a day – and so that additional space will be just a phenomenal enhanced care area for our patients.”

Zimmerman also said the Foundation’s capital campaign project –to raise $15 million for the new hospital – is going well.

When she spoke with Prairie Business on the morning of Nov. 10, she said the Foundation had so far raised a little more than $5 million. But she is confident it will meet the goal.

“We’re kind of waiting on several large grants and other corporate donations that we’re anticipating coming in, and so we should be able to wrap up the year,” she said. “We’ll get a few more months in before we open and we’re on pace for a really good end of the campaign.”