As Joplin Rebuilds, Admissions 'Strong'

Eleven months after a deadly EF5 tornado gutted St. John's Regional Medical Center in Joplin, a temporary "component" hospital has opened in the southwestern Missouri town.

The opening marks the latest step in a remarkable rebuilding effort for a city that was devastated in the May 22, 2011 storm that killed 142 people and left homeless thousands of people.

The new and interim Mercy Hospital Joplin is a $100 million, 150,000-square-foot blockhouse that is storm-hardened to withstand the 200 mph winds that shattered windows, ripped off the roof, and tore through the interior of the old hospital last May. The hospital includes heavy duty shatter-resistant windows and reinforced door frames that shelter interior corridors.

The new hospital is an impressive display of "Show Me State" gumption from the storm-hardened people of Joplin. Even as wind-tossed debris was still settling last May, Mercy Hospital had already established roadside triage. They moved to a 60-bed MASH-style field hospital within a week, and then to modular buildings, and then to the component hospital last weekend.

The component hospital will be used for three years while a 327-bed permanent hospital is built on a 100-acre site about three miles from the gutted hospital. The new hospital is the centerpiece of a $950 million rebuilding effort for Joplin's crippled healthcare services infrastructure.    

On Sunday, 41 patients were transferred during a heavy rain. Other than the damp, Mercy Hospital Joplin CEO/President Gary Pulsipher says the transfer went well. The move came just two days after a string of violent storms spawned dozens of tornadoes in the Midwest. Of late it seems like swaths of violent storms break out every week, so it was understandable when Pulsipher told HealthLeaders Media he is relieved that patients and staff are now safely housed in the component hospital.    

"The storms that worried us Sunday morning were gone by midday. We got our patients moved quickly and without incident," Pulsipher says. "This is truly a facility that can get us through over 200 mph winds. At the old hospital the first thing you notice when you go up and look at it is all the windows are blown out. These new windows are designed around that. Plus we designed safety corridors where staff and patients will be able to go and be free from destruction [like that] of the tornado that hit us almost a year ago."

The component hospital has 55 private rooms that can be switched to semi-private if needed. It boasts a full emergency department with three triage rooms, three trauma rooms, and 18 critical care beds; four surgical rooms; six pediatric rooms; 10 labor and delivery rooms; and a radiology wing with 14 imaging rooms.

"Admissions have been strong. The unit has been busy," Pulsipher says. "We have some beautiful rooms that are much better than at our old hospital that was destroyed. Our ORs are incredible. Our emergency department is gorgeous. We don't have as many inpatient rooms as we used to have, but it is still a very positive experience."

Pulsipher says building costs have made the interim hospital a "purely clinical facility."

"We didn't put anybody there that wasn't clinical. My office is not going to be in that hospital," he says. "Virtually all of our support services are going to continue to be distributed throughout the community. It was too expensive to build that hospital for all those support services as well."

With widespread and violent storms becoming an annual spring rite in the Midwest, Pulsipher says more rigorous building standards may be needed for new hospitals in the region. He says the $500 million Mercy hospital that will open in 2015 will spend an additional $15 million on storm-hardening.

"In California they do a much better job with earthquake codes than we do around here," he says. "So I think we will, in our part of the world, see new buildings become more storm-hardened and ready to take on those kinds of challenges."

In addition, staff at Mercy regularly drills for tornado emergencies. "We just let the patients know it is a drill, and we try to do it on sunny days so that nobody is worried," Pulsipher says. "That happens in just a few minutes and they take the patients to the corridors. There are some patients who are so fragile that we plan to just keep them in their rooms and make the precautions there."

Pulsipher says the rebuilding at Mercy has been particularly satisfying because it is moving in step with the rebuilding of storm-ravaged Joplin. "Our city has been very aggressive in making sure we get rebuilt and also working closely together," he says. "We have had a Community Advisory Recovery Team that has pulled together all segments and I have been very active on that. We have a community master developer that the community has hired to make sure we grow in an intelligent way together."

"When we decided where to site our new hospital we got community leaders together to help us decide where the best place might be for the community not just the hospital," he says. "We are much better integrated now than we were before the storm."

Since May 22, 2011 Mercy Health System has made all the right moves in Joplin. The health system moved quickly in the hours after the storm to bring in resources and reassure the stunned people of a devastated city that the hospital would continue to be there for them.

Mercy ensured that the 2,200 employees at the destroyed hospital would continue to work at other Mercy hospitals and even competitors' hospitals in the region. Leadership understood that a hospital is an important economic driver in any city and that the loss of several hundred jobs would make the recovery more difficult. Also, for practical purposes, they didn't want to lose a dedicated staff when they reopened.

That commitment has sent a powerful message. Through word and deed Mercy Health System is telling the people of Joplin, "we will rebuild together."