It’s been a little over a year in the making, but ground is finally being broken at the Ellsworth County Medical Center Administration Building, Ellsworth, to transform it into a new rehabilitation department.

The ground breaking is at 10 a.m. Sept. 30 in front of the admin building.

“It’s extremely exciting,” ECMC Chief Executive Officer Jim Kirkbride said. “It’s been an awful lot of work and I’m very proud of our coalition of donors, the line of staff who have done their part to get us to where we are and Stacie’s (Schmidt, human resources director) great grant-writing abilities, Dannette’s (Heinze, chief operating officer) operations of getting all the contractors and everybody gathered up, so it’s been a big group effort.”

Kirkbride noted a construction project such as this on the ECMC campus hasn’t taken place in 20-plus years.

Why a rehab project?

Kirkbride said the hospital’s four main services — scopes, pain management, wound care and fusion — are all located in the speciality clinic, and have all grown significantly over the last few years to the point where ECMC needs more space.

“Also, we’ve grown as an organization and we’d like to have more specialists come here to serve the public,” he said. “We’ve just, in general, ran out of space in our speciality clinic.”

Kirkbride said as soon as he had good information and good data from the clinic that ECMC outgrown the space and that more was needed, he started putting (a plan) together and having a conversation with key players.

Why the administration building?

“It (the admin building) is a great resource to us,” Kirkbride said. “The cost of building per square foot in the admin building is a lot less than building inside the hospital. We also want to save valuable space in the hospital for higher accute patient care and move lower accute rehab over to the admin building.”

Kirkbride said a final reason for using the building was the development and initiation of the health and wellness initiatives, in partnership with some of the community’s employers. He noted the hospital is currently planning to relocate those service to the admin building because it will concentrate them in one area.

What’s the plan?

Once the ground breaking is done, Kirkbride said the various subcontractors, led by the main contractor, Murray Company, Wichita, will begin placing equipment and supplies both in the parking lot east of the admin building and in some space inside the building.

Part of the parking lot will be partitioned off and work will begin on the outside of the building, including cutting in new windows, installing heating and cooling units on the roof and other necessary outside demolition/construction and painting while the weather is good. The work will then move inside the building.

Slated for the inside of the building, which will be known as the Health and Wellness Center, the 7,000 square-foot rehab department will be the largest department. Speech and occupational therapy will also be located there. A hydrotherapy system and associated patient dressing rooms will be designed in the space as well.

Basically, the space will be filled by the rehab department with individual exam rooms, an admissions area, a small waiting room and staff lounge, public restrooms and the hydro room with associated dressing rooms.

Heinze said the project will take around four months to complete.

“I think the group we have, the contractor, has a good plan and he understands everybody’s role, so I’m anticipating it to be completed as we have discussed, and we’re all looking forward to that,” he said.

“I think anytime we can offer additional services where we know people are traveling to other communities to get their services, we’re promoting our county and the ability to get those services right here at home,” Schmidt said.

The total cost of the health and wellness building project is $2.2 million, with an additional $150,000 for new equipment.