FAIRMONT – Leadership Marion devoted its monthly visit to an area business to look at WVU Medicine’s Fairmont Medical Center Thursday morning.
The group, through the Marion Chamber of Commerce, visits sites across the county to to raise awareness and generate community involvement said Cari Morgan, FMC’s nurse director and a member of the current Leadership Marion class.
January is quality of life and health care month, she said, and this was an opportunity to show WVU Medicine’s work in Marion County and expansion plans for the former Fairmont General Hospital.
The chain that owned Fairmont General closed the facility in March 2020, leading to a community outcry and involvement of the governor and local legislators in seeking a solution. So WVU Medicine stepped in.
Aaron Yanuzo, vice president of operations at FMC, said, “They wanted us to stay here. This was the staple of the community, versus building a new facility.” It’s centrally located in the county, and building a new hospital would have cost twice what renovating this hospital cost. “We’re very ingrained with the community here and their support has been wonderful.”
WVU Medicine reopened FMC at the end of June 2020. “It was a big effort from a lot of people,” he said.
There was some confusion about FMC’s role, he said, because the state designated it as a COVID overflow hospital, leading some to believe that’s all it was meant for. But it’s far more. While Leadership Marion members met over breakfast, Yanuzo led a brief tour of the hospital.
It has a 22-bed inpatient unit on the third floor with an adjacent 20-bed unit about to open. All the rooms have been renovated and newly equipped.
WVUM’s Heart and Vascular Institute and Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute have space on the fourth floor. There are clinics for cardiology, vascular surgery and neurology; and physicians come in to see patients on site.
“Having these physicians here is really helping keeping people and treating people in the community that they live,” Yanuzo said.
There are outpatient and inpatient labs on site and imaging facilities for x-ray and MRI.
The first floor has as 12-room emergency department with the ability to surge to eight more.
Right now, all patients enter the building through the emergency department, which helps manage traffic flow under COVID restrictions. The main entrance is temporarily closed, but he hopes to reopen it this year or early next.
Expansion plans, he said, include a new central energy plant, a helipad – right now patients have to be transported to a local supermarket parking lot that has room for a helicopter – and by the end of this year a skilled 30-bed nursing unit on second floor.
That unit, he said, will serve patients who no longer need acute care but require a short stay for some additional care or rehab in order to transition back home.
Also coming are a pulmonology clinic and a sleep lab.
Tweet David Beard @dbeardtdp Email dbeard@dominionpost.com
