Hospital expansion to cater to the needs of a growing community

PALMER — Mat-Su Regional Medical Center received a certificate of need approval on July 5 to expand their emergency department from a 20-bed facility to a 30-bed facility.

Due to a fast-growing population, emergency department visits in the Mat-Su Valley have increased by an annual rate of 3.58 percent since 2013, according to a statistics analysis given by the hospital. One of the main reasons for the expansion need has to do with the rising number of people 65 and over moving to the Valley who are then experiencing the events that become common during that age — heart attack, stroke or other traumas. The need goes further than that however, with the issue of behavioral health cases pertaining to an opioid epidemic, according to Alan Craft, director of hospital marketing and public relations.

Between 2015 and 2017, behavioral health visits to the emergency department increased annually by 20.1 percent, according to the same statistics provided by Mat-Su Regional.

Dr. Anne Zink, medical chief of staff for the emergency department, has been with the hospital for nine years and sees more of the opioid problem than most. She attributes the crime seen in the Valley to be caused by an underlying addiction.

“I think we see it in violence, I think we see it in car accidents, I think we see it in theft, but we don’t always talk about it that way. I think there’s also a real stigma with the opioid addiction,” she said.

The medical world itself is partially to blame for the rise in addiction to painkillers in the form of prescription pills, according to Zink. Like most physicians during their training, she was taught that opioids were safe, few people got addicted and that it was the doctor’s responsibility to treat pain, whatever the cost. It was difficult for doctors to look at their suffering patients and not prescribe them pain pills that would instantly solve their problems.

“We were graded for years on how well we did with pain. So we as physicians were part of the problem, and we wrote a lot of opiates,” she said.

Now that they’ve started to understand the susceptibility to addiction, medical care providers have pulled back and began to look at other ways to treat injury and illness, but they still have to deal with the aftermath one way or another. Many pills continue to circulate as people find old prescriptions in a family medicine cabinets and inadvertently become addicted.

“It’s a problem that’s plaguing every aspect of our society. This isn’t isolated to homeless people, it’s not just kids, it’s the elderly, children, it’s your neighbor, it’s your friend, it’s people who are wealthy, it’s people who are poor, and we are seeing it in overdoses both accidental and intentional,” Zink said.

Mat-Su Regional treats the immediate medical consequences of the addiction including people who overdose, are addicted and need help, or people who are withdrawing, but they also work with programs like the Opioid Task Force and Fiend2Clean to help with prevention and recovery.

Because that’s one of the things we identify is that a lot of the folks who have behavioral health problems, they don’t have the necessary family and social support network to help them recover,” Craft said.

The expansion project, which is expected to be finished in 2020, will total 17,599 square feet of renovation with 9,862 feet of that being new construction and 7,738 feet of current space to be redone. The cost will not go over $14,500,529, and will not be paid for in any way by the public. Groundbreaking has not yet been scheduled.

The project was approved after a certificate of need application was given to the community and the state. The process involves a formal review and a public hearing where people are encouraged to give public testimony and write letters of support to the state.

“For all the certificate of needs that we’ve asked for, we’ve had overwhelming community support,” Craft said.