When the new hospital expansion in Bethel is completed, patients and visitors will be able to do something they have never been able to do before: they will be able to drive up to the front door and walk in, without going up a ramp or stairs.
"Even though the building is raised up in the air and on pilings like most buildings in Bethel," says Kent Crandall, the project manager for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation expansion, "we're going to raise the drive up so they can be dropped off and walk straight in on grade like most hospitals anywhere in the world."
Crandall says that YKHC has also included money for improving road access to the new hospital in its budget.
"It's planned to come out of our budget. It's part of the conditional use permit which we received."
The city expects the hospital and associated growth in Bethel to increase traffic from 8, 000 vehicles per day to 12,000.
YKHC is coordinating its construction of road access with the state Department of Transportation and expects to have a design nailed down in a few months, but it will take a few years before the changes to the road are made permanent. Crandall says that they may just start as stripes painted on the roadway.
"And part of the driver for that is DOT has an R1 repaving project planned for the summer of 2019. And so while we will do the temporary striping and reconfiguring, they'll come along the following summer and repave the entire highway and make those turn lanes and markers much more permanent."
Right now the structure is beginning to take shape, although the design is still being finalized. Crandall says that a giant mobile work camp for the 80 or more workers expected to build the new hospital and housing units has been dropped off. The camp came from Prudhoe Bay, has everything workers need, and is going up behind the Bethel jail adjacent to the hospital.
"And we feel it's close enough that workers can simply walk to work and not need to purchase cars or otherwise, but we will be running a shuttle as well."
Crandall expects that, along with local rentals, the units should be enough to house supervisors and special skilled personnel because YKHC expects its subcontractors to hire locally and he is tracking the numbers.
"560 people have registered online or applied to the Davis website, and 80 people have come to the job office to apply for work. To date we've hired about 20 local folks of varying skill levels and we have a goal of, in general, to hire as many as possible."
The housing for the increased hospital staff is also part of the project, and here YKHC is going modular in a big way. Some of the modules are being built in Anchorage, and the rest in South Dakota by Bethel Native Corporation subsidiaries.
"We should see some of those modules being installed here at the end of this month, with the project being completed by November: the two story, two-bedroom unit, and then a three-story, studio/one-bedroom configuration."
When the entire project is completed, patients will be able to come in and get all the care they need with one visit. Crandall says that changes in the way care is delivered will come with the new physical facility.
"We're adopting what's known as the Nuka model of care, or integrated model of care, where each patient has a team that looks at their files before they arrive. So if you're in for a physical checkup and it's time for a dental checkup, they schedule that and attempt to make it easier for the patients on their visit."
The clinic is expected to be ready in a couple of years, but the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation hospital expansion project is not expected to be completed until 2021.