GALVESTON — The reopening of John Sealy Hospital is good news for island residents, even though the hospital’s emergency room will remain closed for the time being, said David Marshall, the facility’s chief operating officer.
Galvestonians who need a routine surgery or physician-ordered hospitalization will no longer have to travel to the mainland to receive the care they need, Marshall said.
Having the hospital open is also good for the community because it means the University of Texas Medical Branch can begin making money again, Marshall said.
John Sealy Hospital and the rest of the medical branch’s facilities closed on Sept. 13 when Hurricane Ike flooded 750,000 square feet of the campus’ buildings.
The extensive storm damage and the loss of revenue the medical branch suffered as a result, estimated at $710 million, contributed to the University of Texas System Board of Regents’ approval earlier this month of a massive layoff that left about 3,000 medical branch employees without a job.
The remaining hospital employees are excited about coming back to work, Marshall said.
“It’s just one more notch you can put on the return to normalcy,” he said. “And it’s thrilling for us to be able to say that.”
Medical branch officials announced late Friday that the hospital would open at 7 a.m. Monday with 200 beds, six operating rooms and four procedure rooms. The facility will serve women and infants, pediatrics, an acute care unit for elderly patients, a medical-surgical unit and transplant and critical-care services.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice Hospital, where state prison inmates receive medical care, also will reopen Monday with 32 beds.
The number of staff members who will work at the hospital will depend on how many and what kind of patients the hospital has, Marshall said.
But after the staffing reductions, the hospital will have just enough personnel to care for 200 patients, he said.
Marshall said he did not know how many staff members that was or how many staff members the hospital needed before the storm to care for patients in the 550 beds available then.
Before the layoffs, the medical branch employed about 12,500 people, 8,000 of them at the island campus.
If all 200 beds opening Monday are full in six months’ time, Marshall said he would be willing to expand the facility’s capacity. But that would require more staffing, something the hospital would need permission to approve, he said.
Although medical branch officials recently predicted it would take at least 60 days for the hospital to reopen, Friday’s announcement did not necessarily come earlier than expected, Marshall said.
The facility’s reopening was dependent on getting its fire suppression, air filtration and food preparation services back up and running, he said.
No one really knew how long that would take, he said.
Although the hospital’s emergency room will not open this week, medical branch officials will re-evaluate its status every two weeks.
Many of the medical branch’s specialists moved their clinics to the mainland after the storm, and without, them hospital officials can’t guarantee that they could handle any trauma case that came their way, Marshall said.
