UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies cut the ribbon on its newest expansion, Pavilion 1, Wednesday afternoon, beginning the process of opening the five story tower over the coming weeks.
The opening comes at a fortuitous time. The hospital has seen a spike in demand since the November closure of Banner McKee Medical Center’s emergency department, and hospital officials said the extra capacity didn’t come a moment too soon.
“We’re always trying to shift patients to where we have beds,” said President and CEO of UCHealth North Region Kevin Unger on Wednesday. “Now this will at least give us a bit of breathing room. Thank goodness it’s opening now and not next year or five years from now. We’d be in despair. This has given us a lot of hope.”
The new pavilion will increase the capacity of the hospital from 191 beds to 287, according to UCHealth spokesperson Kelly Tracer, with room to grow to 323 beds if needed. The top floor of the new wing is “shelled space,” or additional floorspace that can be quickly turned into a new unit when the hospital determines where the greatest need is.
Other floors include a new trauma surgical unit, a surgical intensive care unit, a new outpatient radiology center offering radiation treatments for cancer patients that would previously require a trip to Denver, and new progressive care units, an in-between level of care between ICU treatment and more standard medical care.
The pavilion is the most visible part of a campus-wide expansion initiated in 2022, which also included an expansion of the emergency department, new labs, expanded imaging services, more parking spaces, and other improvements.
The pavilion will open floor by floor over the coming weeks, a more manageable strategy than opening what amounts to an entirely new hospital all in one day. The first patients will be admitted on April 28, with additional floors opening every three weeks thereafter, meaning the tower will be fully open to patients by the middle of this summer, Tracer said.
The expansion has also led to a hiring boom in nurses and physicians to staff the expanded facilities, 325 as of this week and more coming in every day, Unger said.
“We have been extremely lucky on the hiring front,” he said. “Half of our group every week are from somewhere else, they’re from all over the United States and the world.”
The design of the building, according to Russ Sedmak, architect for The S/L/A/M Collaborative, the architecture firm that designed both the original hospital and the new pavilion, is meant to be as maximally comforting to patients and families as possible. This includes balconies, well-lit lounges for families, and a meditation room where families can meet with chaplains or discuss tough topics like end of life care in peace and privacy.
“All of this was originally planned to be the most sustainable, most — what’s the word — hospitable, hospital in the country,” he said. “And I think UCHealth has done a great job allowing this phase of the project to be built in the spirit of that.”
Pavilion 1 is only the most recent phase in the planned expansion of the hospital. The original master plan was designed to allow new expansions to fit effortlessly into the existing hospital, and another new pavilion on the south side of the facility is the next step. Sedmak said that there is not currently a timeline for when that might come about, but said that plans would likely begin to form in the next few years.
