Taped to the wall in Carole Peet’s small Gig Harbor office is a document that reflects the big job still ahead for Peet and her staff.

The document, stretching perhaps 8 feet along the wall, is a detailed timeline of the departmental tasks that must be done before the opening of Gig Harbor’s new 80-bed St. Anthony Hospital next spring.

As chief operating officer at St. Anthony, the 51-year-old Peet, an experienced nurse and hospital administrator who came to St. Anthony and its parent company, Franciscan Health System, in June, it’s her job to see that when the first patients arrive, the facility and the staff are prepared to serve them.

The $160 million, five-story, 260,000-square-foot building – six years in the planning and 18 months in construction on a wooded tract off Canterwood Boulevard – is undergoing final configuration. The ponds outside the entrance were filled with water last week, and the interior finishes are being completed by contractor Sellen Construction Co.

The hospital has already hired 150 of the 450 staff members needed to operate the hospital. It has stockpiled much of the equipment needed to equip it. But work continues at a fevered pace to develop policies and procedures, attract more employees and plan the two-month move-in and training process.

Peet recently discussed with The News Tribune the challenges of giving birth to the Gig Harbor Peninsula’s first hospital.

What’s Job 1 for you now as St. Anthony’s first leader?

The Franciscan staff did an outstanding job of listening to the community and building a beautiful building. My job now as the COO is to create all the operations for inside the building. So my job is to ask what is it that we have to have to care for patients.

Is there a template you follow in opening a new hospital like St. Anthony?

It’s actually a very, very complex process. There aren’t a lot of new hospitals built every year in the country, so there aren’t a lot of experts or resources to draw on for that.

So some of what we’ve had to do is to glean that expertise from consultants and from people who have built hospitals and figure what are those things you have to do to open a hospital. We have about 20 different departments. They work every week on things such as creating the staffing, the policies and procedures and looking at the equipment lists to see that they have all the pieces of equipment they need, from very complex pieces of equipment from CT scanners down to the wastebaskets.

What’s the timetable?

Construction is to be completed on Jan. 7, and we will then be handed over the keys to the building. At that point, we’ll implement our move-in plan. That’s when we begin bringing staff that we’ve hired on board. We’ll begin moving all those pieces of equipment into the building, stretchers, the beds, the IV poles, the thermometers. So many things it boggles your mind.

Once you’ve got the equipment installed, what then?

So once we’ve got all of that equipment in the building, we have to train the staff on the equipment. We have to train them on all the software applications in the building. There are over 450 computers in the building. We have to test interfaces so that we know that when we order a test here, it prints out over there.

You do have a lot of training time on a project this size. It’s the right thing to do for the hospital and the community. We will have people on the payroll for a couple of months before we go live.

Will you do some dry runs to test that everything works well?

The big learning curve is not how to do the things we do because we’ve been nurses and doctors for years, but it’s how do we do things in this building.

We’re going to run mock scenarios for a couple of weeks. That’s what we’ve learned from other people who have done it. You have to do it over and over again and test your processes both on the day shift and the night shift and the weekend.

And then are you ready?

After we do all of that we can’t just say that we’re ready and open the doors. The Department of Health comes in and does a three-day survey to license us as an acute care facility. We’re still looking at opening sometime in March 2009. We still don’t have a firm date yet.

Will St. Anthony offer emergency services as well as inpatient services?

We’re going to have a 24-hour emergency department and 48 beds to begin with. So if someone is having an emergency on the Peninsula, they should come to St. Anthony Hospital. We have expert physicians and nurses staffing our emergency department. Their role is to triage that patient and provide the medical screening and stabilize that patient. If they determine that that patient needs higher-level resources, they can ensure that patient safely gets there. For probably 95 percent of what patients need, we’ll be able to provide that at St. Anthony Hospital. That even includes heart attack and stroke.

When all of this work is behind you, what result are you hoping for?

When we have our first patient on the first day, all of this should be seamless to them, and it looks like we’ve done business for years.

John Gillie: 253-597-8663

blogs.thenewstribune.com/business

Carole Peet

Title: Chief operating officer, St. Anthony Hospital, Gig Harbor

Age: 51

Family: Single mother with a 10-year-old daughter and two adult sons, one a cardiologist and the other who works for NASA in Houston

Home: Gig Harbor

Education: Bachelor of science in nursing, Seton Hall University, N.J.; master of science in nursing administration, University of New Mexico; master of business administration, University of Phoenix

Career: Peet came to St. Anthony from Sutter Coast Hospital, a 59-bed community hospital in Crescent City, Calif., where she was the chief operating officer. Before that, Peet served as director of cardiac and intensive care services, director of medical-surgical services, director of surgical cardiac short stay and preadmission testing and director of a gastroenterology and endoscopy center at hospitals in Phoenix and Albuquerque, N.M.