GENESEO, Illinois – It’s one thing for a hospital to undertake construction of a new medical laboratory. It’s a more complicated matter to do so while building it in what’s essentially the existing space and continuing to serve patients at all times throughout the whole process. But that’s exactly what’s happened at Hammond-Henry Hospital in […]
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GENESEO, Illinois – It’s one thing for a hospital to undertake construction of a new medical laboratory. It’s a more complicated matter to do so while building it in what’s essentially the existing space and continuing to serve patients at all times throughout the whole process.
But that’s exactly what’s happened at Hammond-Henry Hospital in Geneseo, where the $1 million, state-of-the-art lab remodel will be shown off to the public with an open house from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday, March 2. The event was postponed from Feb. 16 due to a winter storm.
For Karrie Wetzell, the lab manager at Hammond-Henry, that will be a landmark date in a process with which she has been involved from Day One.
“Oh, my goodness, yes. It was a huge, huge undertaking actually. In the lab, anytime we move anything, we have a rigorous validation process. We run quality control because we want to make sure a machine is performing just as well after the move as before. We want to provide excellent care to all of our patients, and we have a lot of equipment as well as supplies in the lab,” said Ms. Wetzell, who leads a team of 20 phlebotomists, medical lab scientists and technicians, and a board-certified pathologist.
The planning began about a year prior to the first day of construction. Besides making sure the new lab would comply with all health regulations, the job included setting up a temporary facility near the hospital’s main entrance.
Part of the reason for doing it all in one phase instead of the original two-phase plan was to not disrupt patient service while saving several hundred thousand dollars and four months of construction time.
“So many a sleepless night was involved to make sure we didn’t miss anything. Planning every detail out and making sure we didn’t have any gaps in care. We were fully operational the entire time during the entire move. There was a lot that went into that,” Ms. Wetzell said.
“I had a vision for how I wanted the lab to function and look and we worked with O’Shea (Builders, a central Illinois-based commercial construction company that served as the general contractor),” she said. “We had an architectural team and an interior design team as well as all the experts in engineering and construction. They were all really great to work with. I was able to customize cabinetry and they took some of my input into the scope of the project on things that I wanted to see happen, and I really appreciated that.”
Construction work began in early September, but the lab relocated Monday, Aug. 21, to make way for the construction crew. The hope was to complete the job around the turn of the year, but it was slowed by a problem cropping up in many aspects of life since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
“We were really expecting more about the four-month mark. However, in the times we’re living, supply chain problems are far too common, so we had a couple of little supply chain issues that prolonged things a little bit,” Ms. Wetzell said.
In fact, the evolution of COVID was a factor that pointed to the need for a bigger, better medical lab at the hospital in Henry County, which has grown dramatically over recent decades.
“When I first came to Hammond-Henry 25 years ago, we were lucky to have five outpatients a day,” Ms. Wetzell said. “Over the course of time, we grew. Then fast-forward to the COVID-19 pandemic and our volumes increased to 100-120 outpatients a day, sometimes more. The lab was bursting at the seams with additional laboratory equipment and supplies needed to function. That’s when we realized we needed more space.”
In fact, during the pandemic, the Hammond-Henry lab was testing patients who traveled from all over the state, some as far away as the Chicago area and southern Illinois, because they had no access to COVID testing close to home.
The pandemic also played a more personal, motivational role for Ms. Wetzell in terms of the lab’s development because the disease claimed her father’s life in 2021.
“Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic, my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. My family had to make the difficult decision that he had to go into a nursing home. Obviously not the best time in the world. It was the worst time. He spent three months in the nursing home and he contracted COVID from one of the staff. I wasn’t super-worried about it at first because he was a healthy guy who just happened to have Parkinson’s. And then he was OK, until he wasn’t,” she said.
“It was just awful to go through that, so I got the unique perspective of going through the COVID pandemic on the patient care side where I’m doing all the stuff behind the scenes with testing and trying to keep everybody safe and all of a sudden I was on the other side of that. And then my dad was a patient in the ICU (intensive care unit) and he was alone and I couldn’t be with him. And that was really hard for everyone in my family.
“That added more fuel behind my purpose,” she added. “I’m doing what I was meant to do and it just kind of gave me more passion, I guess, about my job and my patients as a result.
“During the pandemic, everyone rallied together. Hospital and clinic staff worked together to implement the drive-thru respiratory clinic in the emergency department ambulance bay. There were days that we saw so many people the samples were toted to the lab in copy paper boxes. I often worked until 1 a.m. monitoring our supply inventory and COVID positivity rates, just to do it again the next day,” she said. “We did it well, too. I was very proud of how our laboratory functioned. Some other facilities closed their outpatient labs. It never even occurred to me to stop providing service.”
Shortly before the pandemic hit, Ms. Wetzell participated in a survey from the Illinois Critical Access Hospital Network, which is comprised of 57 hospitals throughout the state that are based in small cities and towns surrounded by rural areas such as Hammond-Henry.
“At that time, we were doing about 45,000 tests per month. We’re still at those same levels, even post-pandemic,” she added. “But other critical access hospitals typically are turning out a fraction (10,000 to 15,000) of that. In comparison with our peers, we were an outlier. It made me feel really good because then I know I’m doing everything I can to make sure everybody is getting the lab service they need from us.”
That commitment to the community has been repaid in its support of the new lab, along with the backing of the hospital administration and its board of directors.
“We had some very generous donors that contributed to our project and we are so grateful. Even through the COVID pandemic, the community support was so, so valuable to us. It was just kind of the wind beneath our wings. It really kind of kept our spirits up and kept us keeping on. We’re blessed to be in such a great community,” Ms. Wetzell said.
