The hallways of Holy Cross Germantown Hospital are still empty of the bustle of patients and visitors. The emergency room, maternity ward and surgery suites sit ready, but idle.
Starting next Wednesday, Oct. 1, that is set to change as the hospital officially opens it’s brand new six-story hospital on the campus of Montgomery County’s Community College – Germantown Campus. I got a sneak peek at the hospital over the weekend.
“This is an opportunity to bring health care to the fastest growing and fastest aging part of Montgomery County,” said Holy Cross Health CEO Kevin Sexton. “And if you had to pick a place for it, you can’t pick a better place than Germantown, this area where there’s the most people and the most people without a hospital.”
The $202 million, 93-bed hospital is the first new hospital in Montgomery County in 35 years. It will have about 580 people working there(thousands of job applications were submitted), including dozens of former employees from Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, a spokeswoman said. It is one of the only hospitals in the region to move completely to private patient rooms. It will also have a full-service emergency department, a 15-bed intensive care unit, non-intensive inpatient beds and a behavioral health unit for psychiatric care.
In the sprawling field where the new hospital sprouted, an 80,000-square foot medical office building, as well as a parking garage, are also being constructed with plans to open in July 2015. The new patient tower being built at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring is slated to open in November of 2015.
The hospital faced some challenges while trying to build the new facility, including a court-ordered stop back in 2012. And its nearest competitor, Adventist Healthcare, announced plans earlier this year to partner with Florida-based Centra Care to create open three urgent care centers in Germantown, Rockville and Laurel next year.
Holy Cross Germantown will expand a program meant to grow its future workforce by offering training for Montgomery College students, Sexton said.
“This is the first time anyone’s ever done this on a community college campus but I think we will see this more and more in the future,” he added. The hospital will help supply instructors for health-related classes and be able to recruit talent from the school.
The two institutions first established a partnership in 2004 with the opening of the Holy Cross Health Center on Montgomery’s Takoma Park campus.
“The expansion of clinical rotations for our students is significant, as we look to the future and our goal of sustaining a positive economic impact for Montgomery County and Maryland,” said DeRionne P. Pollard, president of Montgomery College. “Education and health care are intricately and intimately connected to the well-being of the community. When they thrive together, the community thrives as well.”
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