Lincoln hospital gets $133,300 grant

LINCOLN – Penobscot Valley Hospital has secured a $133,300 community facility direct loan that will help transform the facility’s 31-year-old operating room suite into a state-of-the-art place, officials said Friday.

The $133,300 loan, which U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins helped secure, is part of a larger $3.7 million federal loan package awarded Thursday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development office.

The hospital’s bond holders are expected to approve the $133,300 loan in mid-January, Dave Shannon, the hospital’s chief financial officer, said.

“This will allow us to have a little more flexibility within the four walls of our hospital,” Shannon said Friday. “This will allow us to move forward to redesign our emergency room.”

The emergency room redesign still is being planned. Construction likely will begin in 2008, he said.

Renovation and expansion of the hospital’s operating room from one room to two probably will take seven to eight months. It is due to begin in April, Shannon said.

The hospital needs another operating theater, Shannon and Bonnie Deveau, the hospital’s director of business development, said. Surgeons have to share the one operating room, leading to delays.

“It’s difficult on scheduling,” Shannon said. “We have two general surgeons, an OB-GYN, and we have a podiatrist and several visiting physicians, and they all compete for the valuable time that the OR is available.”

“The hospital has not done any renovations or updating in the operating room operations since the building opened in 1973,” Deveau said. “It’s not that it’s in bad shape; it’s that it’s outdated for technology and patient flow. We also wanted to increase its size for our surgical capacity.”

“For us, this is a major expansion,” Shannon said. “At the very minimum, we will be able to operate out of two rooms and cut the wait time between surgeries.”

Penobscot is a 25-bed critical access hospital that handles about 11,000 admissions and 34,000 outpatients annually in the Lincoln area.