SkyRidge begins $45 million expansion

CLEVELAND, Tenn. — Construction began Thursday on a $45 million expansion and renovation project at SkyRidge Medical Center.

“We are done with the destruction and now we are ready for the construction,” Chief Executive Officer Coleman Foss told community and hospital leaders gathered for the groundbreaking ceremony. Outside large windows behind him, workers were preparing the site where an old hospital wing was razed.

The new building will include a 43-bed emergency center, doubling the size of the current ER, on the first floor. The second floor will house surgical suites and the third floor will be private patient rooms, Mr. Foss said.

The construction will take approximately 16 months, he said. Meanwhile, construction of a parking lot for people with disabilities continues at the front of the hospital.

Eventually the west campus, the former Cleveland Community Hospital, will become mostly an outpatient and diagnostics center, he said. The east campus, the former Bradley Memorial Hospital, will be the hospital.

Mayor Tom Rowland said the Cleveland area is growing beyond its origins.

“Our community has always been known as an industrial base, one of the largest in the state,” Mr. Rowland said. “We are quickly becoming a retail hub. I think we will become a regional medical hub as well.”

County Mayor D. Gary Davis praised the project.

“I’ll be the first to say building new, beautiful buildings does not necessarily make for better health care, just as building new buildings doesn’t necessarily make for better education,” Mr. Davis said. “But I think we all agree it’s one of the many ingredients that go a long way to doing that.”

Mr. Foss said the hospital’s people are its most important ingredient.

“Our dream, our goal, our vision is to be the regional referral center for this part of Tennessee; to stop as much out-migration as we possibly can, and then get them to Chattanooga, if that’s where they need to go, or Knoxville or Nashville or wherever it is,” he said.

SkyRidge employs nearly 1,000 people full time and another 200 or so part time, Mr. Foss said.

“It is my vision that we continue to grow this hospital,” Mr. Foss said.

In 2005, the Bradley County Commission agreed to sell county-owned Bradley Memorial to Brentwood, Tenn.-based Community Health Services. Part of the agreement was for Community Health Services to make major renovations..

“You have done what you said you would do and more,” Mr. Rowland told Mr. Foss.

Mr. Foss became CEO in September after seven years at the helm of Dyersburg Regional Medical Center, where he oversaw construction of a new emergency department and expansion of services.