New Hospital Gains Momentum With Alabama CON Approval
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Local leaders won approval in late January to transfer the Certificate of Need (CON) from the current Wedowee Hospital to Randolph County’s new hospital once the facility is built.
A group of almost 50 local delegates traveled to the Capitol in Montgomery on Jan. 27 to support the CON transfer and hear the state’s Certificate of Need Review Board deliberations.
About 86 percent of Randolph County voters approved a special 1 percent sales tax in an August 2015 referendum to finance construction of the new hospital, which will be built on the Tanner/East Alabama campus on South Main Street in Wedowee.
The new hospital will be more than 50,000 square feet in size, featuring 24-hour emergency care, critical care support, inpatient and observation beds, a state-of-the-art surgical suite and advanced diagnostic imaging services.
The facility will replace the existing Wedowee Hospital, which has relied on financial support from Tanner during the past several years to cover its operating expenses. Wedowee Hospital has been hampered by a number of facility-related issues that have rendered it obsolete in terms of modern building codes for medical facilities and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Efforts to renovate the aging facility would be extensive and costly. Even then, the hospital’s location in downtown Wedowee limits it for future expansion. Parking at the site has also been an issue.
Wedowee Hospital has served as the county’s only hospital since Randolph Medical Center in Roanoke closed in 2011.
The hospital will be the fifth in the Tanner system, joining the 201-bed acute care Tanner Medical Center/Carrollton, the 40-bed acute care Tanner Medical Center/Villa Rica, the 25-bed critical access Higgins General Hospital in Bremen and the 82-bed inpatient behavioral health facility Willowbrooke at Tanner in Villa Rica.