Central Peninsula Hospital is moving 55 employees into the vacant JoAnn Fabrics store as part of a $1 million expansion effort that includes bringing on the hospital’s first dedicated dermatologist. The hospital recently signed a lease for the space to relocate and consolidate its billing office and patient financial services department to the former craft store.
Bruce Richards says the staff are moving to make space for the hospital lab to replace equipment that’s reached the end of its usable life. He’s the hospital’s director of government affairs and marketing.
“We're upgrading that to have better equipment, newer equipment, newer technology, faster, and I believe it will be able to do more tests than we can do now,” he said. “So it's an upgrade all the way around.”
The reshuffling will send the hospital’s quality department to the hospital’s River Tower and care coordination to the former quality department space. The lab will expand into the space vacated by the care coordinators.
The hospital is also making room for its first-ever dermatology practice. Richards says the community is currently served by private practices for skin conditions. But as the Kenai Peninsula continues to get older, he says there’s an uptick generally in demand for services across the board. Richards says the new dermatologist will also perform Mohs surgery to treat skin cancer.
“There's just a demand for it, and so we're trying to meet the demand of the community,” he said. “We got to, you know, we'd love to offer everything, but we can't if it doesn't make sense. But there seems to be enough demand for that to occur here.”
Richards says the summer expansion is one piece of a larger master plan for the hospital that’s a sort-of wishlist for the next decade. The hospital also wrapped up a comprehensive assessment of community health needs that are used to help drive hospital decisions.
Central Peninsula Hospital’s new administrative space is scheduled to open this summer. The hospital said on social media their new dermatologist will begin seeing patients in mid-September.
