Closer-to-home remedies in Gig Harbor

New health services in Gig Harbor save patients time, trips

JOHN GILLIE; john.gillie@thenewstribune.com
Last updated: November 23rd, 2008 09:48 AM (PST)

Those trips across the Narrows bridge added 20 minutes or more to the time before each critically ill patient could receive hospital medical attention and took Gig Harbor paramedics miles outside the area they serve.

Those numbers show why Paul Berlin, the fire district’s chief medical officer, is so pleased that Gig Harbor’s first hospital is just four months from its debut.

That 80-bed hospital, St. Anthony, will be equipped with an emergency room designed to cope with the vast majority of the cases the fire district handles.

The $162 million hospital is the latest in a wave of new medical facilities in Gig Harbor, an area that until recent years was almost entirely dependent on Tacoma hospitals and facilities for major medical services.

The growth of medical services on the Gig Harbor Peninsula is the story of a growing and affluent population with a need for such services. Rival Tacoma-based health services companies, Franciscan Health System and MultiCare Health System, reached out to fill the need and capture a share of the Peninsula market.

The St. Anthony emergency room will be within a 10-minute drive to much of the Fire District 5, compared with a 30-minute drive to Tacoma’s hospital emergency rooms.

“When St. Anthony opens, it will save us hundreds of hours of driving time and thousands of dollars in expenses and enhance our ability to respond to medical emergencies,” Berlin said

COMPETITION

The two health care conglomerates, each with a network of satellite hospitals and clinics in Pierce and South King counties, are going head-to-head in Gig Harbor with many of the same services such as urgent-care clinics, cancer treatment and sleep disorder centers.

But the two health care giants are also seeking their own niches on the Peninsula.

MultiCare offers women’s health and spa services, children’s urgent care and sports medicine in conjunction with the YMCA.

Franciscan is going the full hospital route with St. Anthony, emergency room, inpatient care and operating rooms.

The need for Peninsula-based medical care was compelling, both companies agreed, though they’ve disagreed strongly over just what form those additional facilities should take.

In its 2003 application for a state certificate of need to the State Health Department to build St. Anthony, Franciscan made the case for Gig Harbor to have its own hospital:

Gig Harbor was one of two large population centers in the state without its own hospital.

BY THE NUMBERS

Some 3,500 emergency patients in 2002 had to be transported from the Gig Harbor area to Tacoma-area emergency departments.

More than 8,000 patients traveled out of the area in 2002 for inpatient and outpatient hospital care.

On an average day, 52 beds in Tacoma hospitals were occupied by Gig Harbor residents.

Franciscan’s Tacoma hospital, St. Joseph, was among the most crowded hospitals in the state with 75.63 percent occupancy in 2002.

A Franciscan-sponsored survey found that 89 percent of Peninsula residents favored the construction of a Gig Harbor hospital.

“We had over 700 letters of support, and these weren’t just fill-in-the-blank kinds of letters,” said Budd Wagner, vice president of marketing and communication at Franciscan.

Both MultiCare and Bremerton’s Harrison Memorial Hospital opposed the grant of the certificate of need to Franciscan, saying a new hospital was too much too soon. The certificate of need process is designed to limit the number of beds that can be reasonably supported without creating expensive, empty facilities.

Franciscan prevailed, but its request for a 112-bed hospital was cut to 80 beds. Local planning complications delayed the opening from a projected May 2007 until March 2009.

In the meantime, both MultiCare and Franciscan expanded their existing facilities in the Harbor.

NEW SERVICES

The most dramatic change came in June 2007 when MultiCare opened its MultiCare Gig Harbor Medical Park, a 150,000-square-foot lodge-style building on Point Fosdick Drive Northwest. This timber and stone-clad building designed by Tacoma architects BCRA resembles a national park lodge more than a medical building.

The $51 million structure, adjacent to the high-toned Uptown Gig Harbor lifestyle shopping center, is filled with comfortable chairs surrounding soaring fireplaces, art and sculpture.

Not to be outmaneuvered, Franciscan moved many of its Gig Harbor medical operations into the former MultiCare building just across the street from the new Medical Park.

Both health systems had been in the Gig Harbor area for years, Franciscan since the late ’80s when it opened Franciscan Family Care and MultiCare since the early ’90s when it opened a satellite clinic.

The two companies incrementally added services starting with general practices and then moved to more specialized services such as optometry, palliative care, dialysis, sleep disorders, pharmacies and medical equipment and then day surgery.

Wagner said Franciscan realized that not only was the population growing on the other side of the Narrows Bridge but that bridge – at least until a second one was built – imposed a big barrier to obtaining timely health care for Peninsula residents.

EASY TO RECRUIT STAFF

Part of the push for more medical facilities in Gig Harbor came from the medical community itself. Of the 686 physicians on Franciscan’s active medical staff in 2003, nearly 30 percent lived in the Gig Harbor Peninsula area.

Both health systems say recruiting of nurses, medical technicians and physicians to staff the new Gig Harbor facilities has been far easier than normal because of the attractiveness of the area and the quality of the facilities themselves.

Dr. Paul Hildebrand, director of emergency services at St. Anthony, said Northwest Emergency Physicians, the group that provides emergency care services to Franciscan hospitals, has already secured its staff for the new hospital despite the difficult timing for its opening. (Most physicians prefer to switch locales during the summer because of family and academic timetables.)

The new, high-tech facilities are also a magnet for health care workers.

The soaring multilevel Gig Harbor Medical Park structure might give MultiCare the style edge over its competitor now in the Peninsula market, but Franciscan will score its own style and technology points when St. Anthony opens on its wooded, 37-acre campus on Canterwood Boulevard near the Highway 16 freeway in the spring.

ST. ANTHONY

Clad with cool-toned natural stone, the new hospital and its adjacent medical building features woodsy views from its all-private patient rooms. Outside, a rain garden with a flowing stream will enhance the hospital entrance.

St. Anthony’s emergency room, said emergency department nursing director Kathy Bay, continues that private room theme.

Emergency patients will be interviewed and treated in single rooms where they won’t be inadvertently sharing details of their private health history with other patients sharing a room as in other hospitals.

Patients awaiting test results but able to walk can watch flat-screen televisions from comfortable reclining chairs.

A cutting-edge computer system will allow access to their medical records from numerous computer stations, reducing the flow of paper and the repeated interviews common in older hospitals.

Both health systems are enhancing their cancer treatment capabilities. St. Anthony will have the Jane Thompson Russell Cancer Care Center, and MultiCare is opening a radiation oncology center at the Gig Harbor Medical Care Park early next year. MultiCare brags that it’s an affiliate member of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Another early 2009 addition to MultiCare’s Gig Harbor medical repertoire is an ambulatory surgery center. Franciscan had opposed the opening of that center.

“We did oppose the ambulatory surgery center because we believe that this is an unnecessary duplication of services. Franciscan has operated a Day Surgery Center in the Gig Harbor Medical Pavilion on Kimball Drive since the 1990s, and our facility has capacity to handle even more surgeries,” said Franciscan spokesman Gale Robinette.

VARIED SERVICES

An appeals court recently upheld the Department of Health’s ruling that the MultiCare ambulatory surgery operation didn’t need a certificate of need because the doctors operating there will all be MultiCare employees. Franciscan’s day surgery center allows any affiliated physician to use the facility.

While MultiCare won’t offer the kinds of inpatient services in Gig Harbor such as intensive care, emergency room, cardiac catheterization and vascular laboratory and inpatient surgery to be offered at St. Anthony, MultiCare’s Gig Harbor operation is carving out its own thus far exclusive niche with its Women’s Health and Wellness Center and its Healthy Reflections Medical and Day Spa.

This woman-centered facility features both medical and aesthetic help for women with services ranging from obstetrics and gynecology to cosmetic treatments and spa services.

The health center was expecting some 500 women to sample its services at a “Girls Night Out” this week at the center, said Mary Leeper, the center director.

The spa was to put on a demonstration of its newest technology called VelaShape, a Food and Drug Administration-approved radio frequency technology for smoothing cellulite and reducing waste and hip sizes.

“This is a treatment for someone who has done the right things with their diet and lifestyle but still needs to lose a stubborn bit of extra width,” said Megan Pedersen, a licensed esthetician at the center.

BOTOX, ULTRASOUND

The center also features such services as Botox and other wrinkle-easing treatments, cosmetic waxing, diabetic pedicures, massage, dermal fillers, spray tanning and mammograms. Another service the center has added to its list is 3-D ultrasound for lifelike images of unborn babies.

MultiCare has also allied itself with the Tacoma-Pierce County YMCA and features exercise classes and other services both at the Gig Harbor Y and the Medical Park.

Mary Grubbs, administrator at the Medical Park, said MultiCare is adding services both medical and lifestyle-related that its clients say they need.

“We’re sensitive to the Gig Harbor area. We think that convenience is something our clients value.”

Peninsula residents also are happy to have more medical services available to them.

Stacie Anderson, a MultiCare client, said she likes the kind of one-stop shopping that she finds at MultiCare’s Gig Harbor center.

“It’s really beautiful, and they’ve even got baby-sitting,” she said. “It’s not the kind of plain, sterile environment I’m used to in a medical facility.”

Cancer patient Joan Fjermedal said she’s eagerly awaiting the opening of Franciscan’s St. Anthony and its cancer treatment center. She now must make a 48-mile round-trip from her home near Purdy to Tacoma five times a week for radiation treatment.

“We’re overdue for a good convenient hospital on this side of the bridge,” she said. “I’m glad to see it’s about to open.”

CONVENIENCE

Ollala veterinarian Laura Waters said she’s pleased that MultiCare has opened a child-centered urgent-care facility in its Gig Harbor center. That center has saved her several trips to the emergency room at MultiCare’s Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma.

When her daughter Jocelyn got a bead up her nose, the doctor at MultiCare’s Kid’s Express was able to extract it, she said. Before the Kid’s Express, that incident would have meant a multihour trip to Tacoma.

“All of our doctors are over here now,” she said. “It’s a great convenience.”

“I’m happy to see that both hospitals have expanded their facilities over here. I think a little competition gives you choices and better medical care,” said Waters. “The hospital will be a great addition to Gig Harbor. I hope Franciscan and MultiCare can work together.”

John Gillie: 253-597-8663

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Originally published: November 23rd, 2008 12:55 AM (PST)