Porter Medical Campaign Signals Hospital Improvements

Author: Mary Christine Kwiatek

Porter Medical Center (PMC) soon plans to finalize the Capital Campaign, a new project for the hospital's 75th anniversary.

The Center, located just beyond Middlebury College's athletic facilities on South Main Street, serves the local community and Addison County as an emergency center and well-equipped hospital facility.

As of the end of January, the hospital had been promised $4,016,480 in donor pledges. The campaign began in June 2000 with an initial pledge of $250,000 from the PMC Auxiliary. Since then, over 700 individual members, businesses and service organizations of Addison County have contributed $2,758,480 to the campaign's funding. Middlebury College tipped the funds over the $4 million mark with its pledge of $1 million in January 2001.

In a recent press release, PMC President James Daily said, "We are sincerely and deeply gratified by the incredible response from our community to this campaign during some pretty challenging economic times. I met personally with dozens of individual donors, business leaders and service groups during the past 18 months, and it was truly remarkable to see the commitment and support for Porter Hospital and this extremely important construction project."

The Capital Campaign was initiated to support a $14 million construction project for the Medical Center. This new project will improve patient care areas for surgical and maternity services, Daily said. It will also address several serious and chronic facility issues of the hospital.

More specifically, the Porter surgical suite, built in 1975, is not able to handle the number and variety of outpatient surgical procedures that PMC currently performs. It has only two operating rooms, which were considered adequate in the 1970s when it was designed for two general surgeons.

The hospital has "insufficient recovery room space for patients," but there are plans to build new rooms to help with expected growth and the number of patients needing surgical operations, according to Daily.

Most of the surgical procedures performed at the PMC are done in the same-day surgery manner. Because of this, they do not call for the resources of a multiple-day operating room. The new surgical unit that the campaign calls for will offer many special procedure rooms that will be used for laparascopic, laser and other outpatient procedures. In a special procedure room, many tasks will be performed more efficiently.

The improvements in maternity care include a birthing center. This portion of the new wing will allow families to experience a "home-like environment within the confines of a community hospital with immediate access to medical equipment and technology if required," Daily said.

Volunteers for the PMC helped make this project possible, as they assisted in raising the funds for the major gifts portion of the Capital Campaign. Also, hospital physicians pooled over $400,000 and individuals from the PMC boards and PMC Auxiliary Board over $200,000 in funding.

The PMC feels that it can move forward with the project now, even though some proposals are pending and a few potential donors are still planning to pledge. The campaign is now in the project design phase. Daily remarked that administrators are trying to obtain regulatory approvals, one of which is a Vermont State Certificate of Need.

"We must now move forward with the next major phase of our work which is to meet throughout the spring and summer with legislators and regulators. Concurrently, we will be working internally with our architect and construction manager to put the final touches on our plans," Daily said.

The construction stage of the Capital Campaign is expected to begin in 2003.

Porter Hospital hopes that the new project will improve the atmosphere of the PMC and move toward accomplishing its mission statement, which includes "improving the health status of those served."