News : Many see new areas of hospital during Saturday open house

Karlene Langham explained the benefits of the new Sleep Study room during VGH Open House.

A steady stream of people poured through the doors and the new hallways of Virginia Gay Hospital Saturday morning during the open house that showcased the new and newly renovated areas of the hospital.

“They seem most interested in our radiology room and our new ER,” said Administrator Mike Riege.

The renovation includes brand new imaging equipment – CT scanner, MRI and ultrasound. The Emergency Room expanded from 400 square feet to 3,000 square feet.

“When people hear the word ‘radiology’, they think of ‘X-ray,’ but it’s much more involved than that,” said Riege.

The Sleep Study area is completely new. For the past seven years, VGH has been conducting sleep studies with equipment identical to large hospitals. But those studies took place in a regular hospital room that looked and felt like one.

The new Sleep Study area includes a room that Riege said has been mistaken for a hotel room, along with an observation area for sleep specialist Karleen Langham and her staff. That room includes lush carpet, soft pastel walls and a collection of art work.

“We designed this room to not look like a hospital room,” Langham told visitors during the Saturday tour.

Langham also said that the VGH sleep studies – mostly for apnea – can be scheduled within two weeks. Most larger hospitals in big cities, she said, have waiting lists that require a three-month delay.

The VGH renovation project also provided waiting rooms for each area of the hospital.

“This room is now just a place to relax,”said Riege, as he sat in what is now the front lobby. Before the renovation began, that area served as an often crowded waiting room for several of the hospital’s clinics.

Another amenity included in the new addition is the Rodgers Room. Named after a family which made a huge donation decades ago, the room provides a place for families of patients to discuss their options in privacy and comfort.

All three of Vinton’s furniture stores – Nelsons’s, Michael & Dowd, and Barnes – contributed furniture for a kitchen/dining and living-room style suite.

The Thursday evening tour of the newly renovated Virginia Gay Hospital did not include every area of the hospital.

That’s because those areas were in heavy use at the time, said Riege.

“During our tour, the ER was packed, we had several people in imaging and the Rodgers room was occupied,” said Riege on Saturday. “It was an inconvenience for our tour but it also showed our visitors why we built all of this.”