‘Beam signing’ celebration
Employees of Glencoe Regional Health Services (GRHS) were invited Monday to become a personal, permanent part of a $4.1 million expansion project.
Employees gathered in the GRHS cafeteria for a “beam-signing” ceremony. Signatures and personal messages were gathered on a piece of steel, which will be incorporated into the third-story expansion project.
That project got under way in July, and is expected to be completed in spring 2016. Currently, a large crane is dominating the area on 18th Street, putting expansion beams into place on the roof of the two-story hospital.
The project will add 12,000 square feet of space, which will be devoted to rehabilitation services.
Jon Braband, GRHS chief executive officer, said Monday that the local medical facility has long known that it needed to address space issues for its rehabilitative services program.
Even when GRHS was making budget cuts a couple of years ago, it was adding therapeutic staff because of increasing demand for rehabilitation services, Braband said.
“Since 2011, we have experienced a 65 percent increase in the annual number of patient appointments for physical, occupational and speech therapy,” said Braband.
The program grew so much that Braband and John Doidge, vice president of finance, were pushed out of their administrative offices.
“We had to move up the street,” joked Braband.
Braband said GRHS began looking at ways to internally rearrange space to accommodate the growing rehabilitation program.
“But nothing seemed like a good fit, and nothing seemed to flow right,” said Braband.
The decision was made to add on to the building with another story.
For more, see the Oct. 14 print edition of The Chronicle.
