A southern Iowa hospital will break ground next July on a nearly 20 MILLION dollar project that includes adding a labor and delivery suite and a permanent MRI system at the hospital.
“We’ve had some significant projects in the last 10 years,” said Shenandoah Medical Center CEO Matt Sells, “and this kind of completes the puzzle for us.”
The first phase of this latest project will provide new space for Shenandoah’s ambulance service, including three parking bays and a training center for EMTs. The Shenandoah hospial has been bringing in a mobile MRI unit three days a week and Sells said that means appointments are scheduled back-to-back and the unit isn’t always available in emergency situations. Sells says the $1.5 million to be spent on new space and permanent M-R-I equipment will improve hospital’s stroke program. “We will be bringing the latest and greatest in technology in and there really shouldnm’t be much we can’t accomplish here, which will really help our folks in the emergency room and throughout the facility,” he said, “our orthopaedics and sports medicine programs and everything else we’re trying to do from a neuro perspective as well.”
Other parts of the project deal with existing services at the hospital, “iIncluding expanding our labor and delivery suites to four as well as doing a new pharmacy, respiratory and in-patient rehab area,” Sells says, “as well as a bariatric inpatient room also.” Bariatric surgery is an obesity treatment that helps control hunger and changes how the body digests food.
Shenandoah’s first hospital opened in 1918. A new 44-bed hospital was constructed in 1979 and there have been major additions to the facility in the decades since, including a new cancer center and nursery in 2024.
(By Ethan Hewett, KMA, Shenanadoah)