Texas County Memorial Hospital board members toured the newly renovated office annex building Tuesday after their monthly board meeting on Tuesday. The annex, formerly the TCMH business office, will be home to the new sleep study lab and several existing TCMH services.
VikiLyn Brady, director of Hospice of Care, guided the tour in the portion of the building dedicated to the new Hospice of Care offices.
“We are very grateful to be able to move into this new and beautiful building,” she said.
Hospice is currently located in an office building on the east side of U.S. 63 across from TCMH. They share space with Home Health of the Ozarks. The new location on the hospital’s main campus will more than double the available space for the Hospice staff, which includes a chaplain, a social worker, nurses and aides.
“Our staff spends a lot of time going back and forth between the hospital and our office to see patients, to get medicine and to handle billing, so it will be very convenient for us to be able to move on site,” Brady said.
The Hospice of Care offices take up about half of the available space in the renovated building with room for supply quarters, a utility area and a break room.
Jay Gentry, director of the TCMH Healthcare Foundation, will have an office in the building, and Deborah Belt-Kell, professional counselor and therapist at TCMH, will also have an office in the building.
Two rooms with bathrooms and a tech room make up the sleep study laboratory portion of the building.
The TCMH environmental services department did renovations on the building. They gutted the building and rebuilt the interior with a little outside professional help – from hanging sheetrock to refinishing old doors.
Wes Murray, chief executive officer at TCMH, and Brady were complimentary of the work done in the building.
“Our staff has done a great job on this building,” Murray said, “and they were able to save us a lot of money by doing most of the work in house.”
The office annex is currently waiting on a new roof to be complete. Roofing materials are on site, but the roofing company needs at least four days of good weather to install the roof. None of the existing services will relocate to the office annex until the new roof is on the building.
Sleep lab equipment has been ordered and is expected to arrive in May. Appointments for sleep studies will be taken at that time. A public open house and ribbon cutting will be held at a later date.