Whitfield Regional Hospital to open renovated ER in July

Whitfield Regional Hospital is set to open its new Emergency Department in July, which is part of a $5 million investment in the Demopolis facility.

The hospital’s new Emergency Department will feature 10,000 square feet of renovated and additional space and new exam rooms, triage area and waiting room. The ED also will have specialty areas for psychiatry and orthopedics. 

“It’s going to be beautiful,” CEO Doug Brewer told the Black Belt News Network in an exclusive tour.

Whitfield serves not only Marengo County but surrounding Black Belt counties. The next closest emergency department in the Black Belt is Vaughan Regional Medical Center an hour away in Selma.

Whitfield Regional Hospital, a member of the UAB Health System, spent $2.75 million on the ER renovation. The rest went toward new equipment including new imaging machines like ultrasounds that have been added to the CT, MRI, nuclear medicine, mammography and echocardiograms machines at the facility.

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They also replaced 16-year-old beds in the patient rooms with state-of-the art beds, Brewer said. Whitfield Regional Hospital is licensed for 99 beds, but capacity is 57 because there aren’t enough nurses to staff more beds.

“We want to open a Cardiac Care Unit step-down unit, but we don’t have enough nurses,” Brewer said, adding they need six to eight more nurses for the unit.

Brewer says it has been difficult finding nurses to hire, especially in the Black Belt. That’s why Whitfield was excited to be a teaching facility for the proposed healthcare high school that Gov. Kay Ivey said was destined for Demopolis in her state of the state speech in March. The statewide school, which was to be built along the lines of the School of Fine Arts in Birmingham and the School of Math and Science in Mobile, was removed from the supplemental education budget. The project must now survive a feasibility study. 

The ninth through 12^th grade students would live at a facility built at the former New Era building site located behind Whitfield and learn alongside staff at the hospital. It would groom healthcare workers to work in the Black Belt, where it is needed, Brewer said.

“You can see the building where they want to do the school from here,” Brewer said.