CEO Update: ‘This is an exciting time for CMH and the Bolivar community’

In the CEO Video Update, Michael Calhoun, CEO/executive director of CMH and the Citizens Memorial Health Care Foundation, shares the latest happenings at CMH. A text summary of the video is below.

During the summer of 2022, Citizens Memorial Hospital and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Rural Development announced a $77 million expansion and renovation project for the hospital facility. The project includes new or renovated spaces for all aspects of the patient experience at CMH.

USDA Rural Development is providing a low-interest $57.8 million loan, at 2.5% interest for 35 years. Loans from local banks will complete the funding.

The expansion exceeds 130,000 square feet, and the renovation is 23,000 square feet. We will have a new emergency department, cafeteria, med/surg, Birth Place, ICU, cath lab, surgery department and laboratory. New construction will be on the south side of the hospital, approximately in the location of our current cafeteria.

We also have started planning how best to use the existing hospital space after the expansion is complete. That area will include office space and services that support the in-patient experience.

Design process update

We’re in the design development phase of the project. First, we completed the schematic design, which is the overall big picture of what services we’re going to have in the new space.

Design development gets into the details of each room. For example, we’ve been looking at where the sharps containers are going to be and how the head walls are going to be laid out. We’ve been working with frontline staff, leaders and physicians to look at the details of the room to make sure they are properly designed.

Our next step is hiring a construction manager to move us into the construction phase. We hope to break ground in the fall of this year.

For the next 40 years

This is an exciting time for CMH and the Bolivar community. Forty years ago, we built a new hospital here on empty land. Now we’re able to put essentially a new hospital in this expansion. It’s something that we can really rally around and get excited about. This will take us into the next 40 years.