Thursday, Feb. 10
February 10, 2011Norah Dufrene
February 14, 2011
Portrayed as a combatant to the increase in health care costs, Thibodaux Regional Medical Center announced Thursday its plans to build a 70,000-square-foot, $18 million wellness center on the TRMC campus.
Hospital CEO Greg Stock said in a 15-minute speech to invited attendees in the foyer of the hospital’s main entrance that the new outpatient center’s purpose is to facilitate healthy lifestyle habits in the 250,000 people the hospital serves.
The wellness center should be complete two years after the architects start to design it, which should be some time this year, Stock said.
Stock cited the state’s poor standing health-wise when compared to the rest of the nation and the opportunity to cut cost by preventing cardiovascular disease and determining what areas of a person’s life need a greater emphasis. Stock compared the opportunity to prevent life-threatening diseases with cutting-edge technology to “two and two equals ten. We really get more bang for the buck for everybody in every sense.”
“There is plenty of information out there [about the state of the population’s health] and there are people doing good things about it, but maybe we’re not all doing enough about it,” Stock said. “There are certainly opportunities for us to continue to improve.”
The five-story facility will house sports medicine programs, a fitness center, a pool, a spine center, a state-of-the-art imaging center with CT and PET scans and MRIs and physician’s offices, among other wellness-centric programs and technologies.
“We right now treat over 100,000 outpatients every year, and we do it mostly in a hospital setting,” Stock said. “By creating what we call in our business an outpatient setting, the buildings are actually designed and built differently so that they accommodate the floor patients better. The outpatient services are not interrupted by inpatient occurrences.”
Often lost in the partisan debate about health care reform and the costs that will come with it is the patients’ responsibility to do their best to stay in shape and lessen their burden on the hospitals, TRMC radiologist Jay Fakier said.
“One of the things that’s infuriated me over the last, say year, two years with all the talk of health care reform and cost is that nobody wants to address the patients’ responsibility in decreasing health care costs, and that is huge,” Fakier said.
Fakier said the wellness center can serve as a refuge for people who want to improve their health but do not want to discuss issues.
“Nobody wants to address it because it’s a difficult subject to talk about,” Fakier said. “Nobody wants to look at themselves and say, ‘Oh, I’m overweight.’ Nobody wants to tell anybody they’re overweight. Nobody wants to say, ‘You have to stop smoking,’ or ‘You need to go exercise,’ but we have to address it, and hopefully this will help to address that issue.”
