Salem Township Hospital CEO Jim Timpe told the hospital board Wednesday afternoon that the hospital’s expansion and renovation of the emergency room and operating room remains on budget and schedule.
“If you drive by the hospital towards the back, you can see that all of the masonry work is done on the addition to the hospital, so you can kind of see how the back of the hospital is going to look by the emergency room,” Timpe said. “Phase two is well underway. We expect phase 2 to be completed in December, which means we should be moving the emergency room and our same day surgery areas from their temporary locations back to their home locations in January.”
The complete project is still scheduled for August of next year.
Timpe also discussed vacant positions at the hospital.
“The great news is that our turnover is lower than it has ever been,” Timpe said. “We also are seeing most of our positions filled. The open positions that we do have are in nursing, mainly on nights, and that’s consistent with the rest of the country. Nursing right now doesn’t have enough people in it, and we need as many people as we can to go into nursing so we can fill all those jobs up.”
The board was told the hospital had another good month in July driven by emergency room usage and outpatient services as in patient usage was well under budget. Timpe said the low in patient census was not unusual for a summer month but expects that to change now that school has resumed and with the winter months ahead. The hospital has been above budget for all four months of the new fiscal year and has already provided $286,913 in charity care to those unable to pay their bills to lack of insurance.
The hospital’s overall satisfaction rating for the first four months of the fiscal year is 93 percent, above the goal of 89.1 percent.
