The proposed replacement hospital for Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital will have 58 fewer beds than the current facility if the Certificate of Need application is approved by the State Health Planning and Development Agency.

The CON states a 300-bed, $251 million replacement facility will be built in Lauderdale County to update and expand medical services in the area.

ECM Chief Nursing Officer Tiffany Keys said growth in modern health care has been prolific in outpatient procedures and facilities, and beds associated with those services are not included in the number of licensed beds in the CON application.

A new facility would allow expansion in places the current hospital cannot grow, such as critical care units, Keys said. Additionally, the proposed hospital has room for expansion on each of its six floors, she said.

ECM has 11 beds in its intensive care unit and 11 in the cardiac intensive care unit.

The new facility will have 22 beds in each of those departments.

“That is where the inpatient need is,” Keys said. “When patients are coming to the hospital, they are sicker and in need of those critical care units. Those are the places where we are in need of more room but cannot expand.”

ECM spokesman Tom Whetstone said critical care units are more expensive to operate, so the decision to double the number of beds in those units was not made lightly.

“We would not be expanding that area if the need wasn’t there,” he said.

The proposed facility would have 73 fewer medicine/surgical beds and 14 fewer pediatric beds. Plans also call for two additional cardiac thoracic recovery beds and two additional progressive care beds.

Keys said when planning the new facility, architects met with managers from each of the hospital’s departments. Proposed plans were available for review by doctors, nurses, administrators and department managers.

“The new facility is a better use of our resources,” Keys said. “We never use all of the medicine/surgical beds we are licensed for and we aren’t seeing a full pediatric unit, either.”

RegionalCare will have 12 months after beginning operation to reinstate the 58 beds they plan to forfeit. If the company opts to reinstate the beds after 12 months of operation, another CON requesting the addition would have to be submitted, said Alva Lambert, state Health Planning and Development Agency executive director.

“If they surrender those beds to public health and choose not to license them, they would be gone and would not be able to access them,” Lambert said.

The same would hold true if the number of licensed psychological beds or rehabilitation beds changed with the construction of the new facility, he said.

Lambert said given the fact that every county in Alabama has more licensed beds than are needed, it’s not uncommon for new hospitals to downgrade their number of beds when constructing new facilities.

In Lauderdale and Colbert counties combined, there are nearly 300 more beds licensed than are needed, according to information posted at the agency’s website.

When CONs began in the 1970s, hospitals that already existed were “grandfathered in,” meaning they were allowed to keep the number of beds that already existed in the hospital, despite the number of beds needed in the county, state health planners said.

Jennifer Edwards can be reached at 256-740-5754 or jennifer.edwards@TimesDaily.com

Hannah Mask can be reached at 256-740-5728 or hannah.mask@TimesDaily.com.

By the numbers

Eliza Coffee Memorial has 358 beds divided among the following departments: