Tehachapi News

New hospital none too soon

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If there is an unused inch of space at Tehachapi Hospital, Alan Burgess would like to know where it is.

Crutches, medical machines and office machines are tucked into alcoves and hallways.  Information technology equipment, jammed in the back of a subdivided room, hums along in open cupboards to stay cool. Offices the size of closets contain three or four desks. A floor-to-ceiling wall of patient records in tidy manila folders slides open to reveal another wall of documents hiding behind.

The operating room, while still licensed by the state, sterile and useable, is locked.

“I don't even keep a key,” Burgess said.

Financial and other offices inhabit trailers behind the hospital building, with mobile medical units parked alongside. Auxiliary services are jammed into old houses flanking the hospital at 115 West F Street.

Nevertheless, the hospital, built in 1954, is clean and fresh and functional and supplied with good medical technology.

Burgess, chief executive officer of the Tehachapi Valley Healthcare District, is maintaining the little community hospital at maximum load while planning for a new facility to serve the Greater Tehachapi area.

When he assumed the post of CEO a year ago, Burgess was expecting to oversee the construction of the new hospital, which was well into its design and approval stages.

Construction of the proposed new hospital, funded in 2004 with $15 million in bonds, ran off-track when the district's board of directors - concluding that the design was flawed -- fired the original design/build firm in June. The district is now working with the husband- and- wife strategic planning team of Kathleen and Michael Philps of Philps & Associates to help get the project back on track. The directors have named a new project manager, Norm Clendenin, who will take over immediately.

Burgess is nearly buried in business cards from vendors approved by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development -- known as the dreaded “OSHPD,” pronounced “OSH pod.”

He has 428 vendor cards so far, he said, and material from  19 design/build firms who want to bid on the new hospital. Five have made presentations to the district board.

The multi-wing building plan presented by the original design/build company and nursed -- sometimes in an adversarial manner -- through the state approval process, Burgess said, “was a pretty design but not functional.”

There were too many inefficient outside walls, inadequate lab space and a layout that did not make sense, he said.

In the rejected design, Burgess said, a patient leaving surgery would have to be pushed through a series of non-sterile areas to get to the recovery area -- past the doctors' sleeping room, the triage area, gift shop, radiology, kitchen and loading deck, the labor-delivery-recovery-postpartum area and the skilled nursing facility with “swing” beds for either acute or long-term care.

“Once we got them thoroughly contaminated,” Burgess said, the patient finally would arrive at the medical surgical wing for recovery.

Recently, setting aside a copy of the jettisoned floor plan in his office, Burgess said, “I like to keep it away from my eyes. It just drives me nuts.”

The decision to terminate the contract after spending $1.1 million on it, he said, was the right thing to do.

“We could have easily bit a $15 million bullet. Instead, we dodged it.”

The original Tehachapi hospital was a 1918 boarding house, converted in 1936 to an acute care hospital. In 1952, the 7.5 Kern County earthquake leveled the two-story frame building. The hospital built in 1954 is the present one. Lack of documentation of the original hospital plans, Burgess said, prevents the state from  authorizing a seismic refit.

Gone is what Burgess calls “The In-n-Out Burger” 50s-era sign, but still standing as sentinals at the front entrance are the great evergreen trees that existed when the earliest structure was built.

The hospital provides 24-hour emergency service, six beds for acute care and, at the moment, cares for 19 skilled nursing facility (long-term) patients.

The kitchen provides fresh meals and accommodates special diets for the long-term patients, who can stay as long as they need to. An activities director arranges music, workouts, tea and coffee, shuffle board, wheelchair basketball, barbeques, Bible study, table games and bingo for the long-term patients.

“They watch Dr. Phil every day,” Burgess said. “For some reason they love Dr. Phil.”

When the new hospital is built, Burgess said, the present facility will remain a skilled nursing facility.

Walking along a hallway in the hospital last week, Burgess came across an elderly patient sitting dejectedly in her wheelchair. He called her by name and received no response.

“What's wrong with Virginia?” he asked a nurse.

“She's upset because we had to move her to change her bed,” said a nurse.
Burgess smiled and said a comforting word to Virginia.

“We become very attached to our long-term patients,” he said. “It's a blessing knowing our patients by their first names.”