GRAFTON, N.D. — The Unity Medical Center (UMC) in Grafton announced on Dec. 15 an expansion on the 60-year-old hospital. The groundbreaking is expected to take place in summer 2018, with project completion projected for fall 2019.

The three-story expansion will have a $12 million budget, and is intended to upgrade the out-of-date facility into a modern state-of-the-art facility. The expansion will include a larger operating department on the first floor, improved and larger patient rooms on the second floor and a third floor that will be used for educational purposes, offices and mechanical rooms.

New patient rooms will feature 250 to 300 square feet of space — as compared to the current 100-square-foot patient rooms. In addition to being small, many of the current UMC patient rooms are not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities act, according to a recent article by the West Fargo Pioneer. In addition to providing more space, the new rooms will offer more privacy, and patients will no longer need to share rooms.

Larger, more private rooms will be a welcomed luxury for patients, according to Lisa Ferguson, nurse at UMC in a recent interview with WDAZ, with better accessibility to restrooms and more room for patients and visitors alike to move around, as well as offering more space for visitors to stay the night if desired.

The upcoming expansion will be the product of a planning process that began in 2015 to update the facility. Another part of the plan for updating the medical center has already been completed — UMC finished a $550,000 renovation project for its clinic in May, a project that improved privacy and office space for staff in that building.

The current two-story hospital building that houses the operating department (with original overhead lighting from 1956), patient rooms, physical therapy and rehab services will be repurposed for office space once the expansion is complete.

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The architects on the project are Shepley Bulfinch in Phoenix and GLHN Architects & Engineers in Tucson. The construction contractor was a joint venture (Sundt|DPR, A Joint Venture) between Sundt Construction in Tucson and DPR Construction located in Phoenix. This was the seventh joint venture partnership for Sundt and DPR Construction. The whole team broke ground on the tower in May 2016, according to a recent statement, while completion is currently slated for 2019.

The budget for this 670,000-square-foot project and renovations on the existing 75,000-square-foot facility is $400 million, with $50 million of that going to new patient care equipment and computers for state-of-the-art care. The new tower will be nine stories tall, and will have a new main entryway, new cafeteria and support departments on the first floor, according to a statement.

There will be new diagnostic imaging, diagnostic cardiology, cardiac cath labs and interventional radiology on the second floor. The tower will also include new operating rooms and patient prep and recovery space on the third floor, 204 new patient rooms on floors five through nine, and women and infant services on the fifth floor, with more medical and surgical and ICU beds on floors six through eight. The ninth floor will have more medical and surgical beds in addition to 24 more patient rooms.

The placement of this final piece of the tower marks that the uppermost structural framing of the new tower is ready to be set and that the structure has reached its maximum height. While the new tower is currently in its metal “skeleton” form of what it will eventually become, it is scheduled to open for services in spring 2019.

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