ST. GEORGE — The days of being beyond capacity because of the COVID-19 pandemic has moved into the rearview mirror, but that isn’t the only reason there is a little more elbow room now at St. George Regional Hospital.
Last week, the hospital completed an addition to the hospital’s Intermediate Neuro Unit that included 10 additional patient beds and an additional nurse’s station. That increased the number of patient beds in the hospital to 294.
The unit serves as a middle ground between the intensive care unit and the general patient population for those who have recently suffered neurological injuries like strokes, brain hemorrhages and brain tumors.
“Our need has grown significantly over the past few years and we are excited to have these rooms ready for use,” Craig Squire, nurse manager for the Intermediate Neuro Unit, said in a press release.
It is the first substantial expansion for the hospital since the 2018 additions that included the east patient tower, the Women and Newborn Center and the Cancer Center for what was then Dixie Regional Medical Center.
The space for the new addition was included when the east patient tower was built. It was part of the piece labeled “for future growth” on the architect’s drawings.
Mitch Cloward, the hospital’s administrator, said in a statement that the COVID crisis played a role in making it easier to include the additional beds in the hospital’s 2021 budget, but so did the increasing population of Southern Utah.
“Our community has grown significantly since we expanded in 2018, and we will make good use of these rooms,” Cloward added. “We need them.”
The need for more beds was especially evident during the pandemic – especially between last August and February when the hospital was almost always beyond capacity.
In the last few weeks, hospital officials and reports from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have had the hospital between 70% and 90% of capacity, but it’s not because of COVID patients.
On Thursday, the number of COVID patients at the hospital could be counted on one hand, according to multiple sources. There have been several days in the last two weeks when there have been no COVID patients at all in the hospital three weeks after the state officially moved from a pandemic to an endemic stage of COVID control.
“Last week, for the first time in two years we went three days in a row with zero COVID patients,” Cloward said. “It felt wonderful.”
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