Clay Regional, Saint Joseph Hospitals Serve Area
Published May 08, 2009
Facilities at Pattie A. Clay Regional Medical Center include the modern angiography suite. Also in Madison County is Saint Joseph-Berea.
To understand the philosophy of Pattie A. Clay Regional Medical Center in Richmond, you need to know a little about Pattie A. Clay herself, says Bob Hudson, the hospital’s president and chief executive officer.
“At the mere age of 14, she would take Civil War victims into her home and take care of them. She could take care of four at a time – and it didn’t make any difference whether they were Union or Confederate,” Hudson says. After the war, she cared for sick Madison County residents until her death in 1891. A year later, her husband gave a cottage to the community to establish an infirmary in her memory. “We’ve grown from that four-bed cottage to a 105-bed facility,” Hudson says.
An acute-care, five-floor medical center, Pattie A. Clay serves about 75,000 patients annually and handles 26,000 emergency-room visits. The hospital’s surgeons offer a comprehensive range of procedures, and its intensive-care unit consistently ranks at the top in patient-satisfaction surveys. Physicians on the medical staff cover 23 different specialties.
Madison County also is home to Saint Joseph-Berea, established on the grounds of Berea College in 1898. The 25-bed hospital, part of the Lexington-based Saint Joseph Health System, includes a 24-hour emergency department, family medicine, heart institute, breast center, diabetes and nutrition services, rehabilitation, sleep wellness center, and surgical services.
Renovations and Upgrades
At Pattie A. Clay Regional Medical Center, renovations began in September 2008 on the third and fourth floors. The result of the $4.2 million project will be private patient rooms – 47 in all, each with its own bath and thermostat control – on those two floors. Privacy will be enhanced and noise minimized by substantial insulation between rooms.
In addition, energy-efficient windows and new plumbing and electrical lines will be installed. “Today, the electrical requirements of a patient room are much greater than they were back in 1970, when the original facility was built,” Hudson says.
In October 2008, Pattie A. Clay’s wide-ranging imaging services received an upgrade, too, with the addition of digital mammography. “You would be surprised at the clarity of those exposures versus the conventional film method,” Hudson says. “It’s absolutely remarkable.”
For patient convenience, the medical center also is expanding beyond its main campus. In November 2008, an outpatient laboratory and wound-care clinic opened at 114 Big Hill Ave. in Richmond. And the hospital is poised to open a primary-care center in Lancaster in neighboring Garrard County.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Antony Boshier
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