Sunrise expanding to meet population growth

Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp.'s Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas is expanding by tripling the size of its emergency room, to 35,000 square feet, while adding two new floors.

Sunrise also is adding a helicopter pad to the top floor of what will be a three-story building.

"We're building a complete new emergency department," said Ann Lynch, Sunrise spokesman. Work should be complete in six to eight months, she said.

She said emergency rooms throughout Clark County are working near capacity, but the construction of megaresorts close to Sunrise have made the need particularly acute at her hospital. The new emergency room alone will cost about $14 million, Lynch said.

The hospital will use the new second floor for cardiac care, she said.

Columbia's MountainView Hospital in the western part of the city, in the meantime, is adding 72 rooms to the existing 120 and new open-heart-surgery capabilities.

"We've had so much growth out here -- we're averaging 93.4 percent to-date occupancy," President Mark Howard said. That's the highest occupancy rate for any hospital in the state, he added.

While Sunrise hospital on Maryland Parkway east of the Strip is about 40 years old, MountainView has served the fast-growing western communities, including Summerlin, only a little more than 3 1/2 years.

"Never in the history of the U.S. has there been such a major expansion of a brand new hospital," he said. The $34 million expansion will add five new operating rooms, two of them dedicated to open-heart surgery, a new capability for the hospital.

Work on the MountainView expansion started May 1 and should be complete in the late spring or early summer next year, he said.

Doctors at both hospitals said Columbia is responding to the area's growth.

"The growth of this town has been phenomenal and exponential," said Dr. Graham Wilson, medical director of Sunrise's emergency department. The expansion is an effort "to cope with the volume that's going along with that growth."

Hospital administrators are hoping that another emergency-room expansion won't be necessary for at least a decade, Wilson said.

Lynch and Wilson said the emergency room won't only be new -- it will be better.

Instead of one entrance, the new emergency room will have three, including doors on Maryland Parkway and La Canada Street, Wilson said. The hospital will also double the number of ambulance parking spaces to about one dozen.

Inside the emergency room, reconfiguring the space will put physicians and nurses in the center of the emergency area with patients on an outside ring. That means medical staff can observe and get to a patient more quickly in the event of a problem, Wilson said.

"If you see something untoward happening, you can just step up," he said.

The new arrangement also will provide greater separation between the pediatric and adult emergency rooms, Wilson said.

Imaging services, including x-rays and CAT scans, will be available within the new emergency room, saving time and avoiding moves for patients, he said.

"When it's finished it will be the most up-to-date emergency room in the country," Lynch said.

Cardiologist Samuel Green said expansion at MountainView is important because patients now have to go to competing hospitals for heart-bypass surgery.

"The bypass capability makes it a full-service hospital," he said.

The expansions at Sunrise and MountainView are not unique to the county. University Medical Center, Desert Springs Hospital and St. Rose Dominican Hospital are all building additions or new hospitals.

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