Inova Outlines Details Of $43.6M Hospital Expansion

Representatives from Inova Mount Vernon Hospital outlined the status of the $43.6 million dollar expansion of the hospital Wednesday night before the Gum Springs Civic Association.

The expansion will result in more than 65,000 square feet of new and improved hospital space.  The enhancements will affect all sectors of the hospital, including surgical, orthopedics, joint-replacement, and rehabilitation care, among others.

"When you put it all together, it basically doubles the size and scope of the hospital," said Inova Hospital Systems' (IHS) legal representative Sarah Hall.

The expansion includes a 14,000 square foot addition to the emergency department and two new bed towers. One of the towers will include three stories and an additional 53,000 square feet to be constructed over an existing section of the hospital. 

The other is a four-story bed tower addition of approximately 75,000 square feet to be constructed over the proposed emergency department expansion.

The towers will enable the hospital to increase the number of private patient rooms and decrease the number of shared rooms. The healthcare facility expects to add two new ambulatory care centers at 75,000 square feet each.  The expansion will also include a six-level, 1000-plus space parking deck.

CEO of Inova Mount Vernon Hospital Barbara Doyle said the hospital hopes to add over fifty new staff positions to the Mount Vernon area.

Despite years of financial trouble, Doyle said the hospital is ready to initiate the expansion process.

"We are financially sustainable now, and will be going into the future," she said.

The plans are still very much in silly putty form, sure to be bent, stretched, and augmented as the process moves along. The expansion is certain to happen in phases, but what those phases will look like is still undetermined.

"It might take 10 years, it might take 15 years, it might take 20 years, we just don't know," admitted Hall, who works for Blankingship & Keith.

Residents at the Gum Springs Civic Association meeting were most interested in the transportation implications of the hospital expansion.

Hall explained that Inova and their planning team have been in consultation with the Virginia Department of Transportation throughout this process, and the team had recently completed the mandatory traffic impact analysis study.

The findings, Doyle reported, showed that increased traffic due to the hospital expansion may eventually call for the instillation of three new traffic lights in the area, only one of which would have to be explicitly mandated by VDOT.

Additionally, through their findings, INOVA decided one way to address increased vehicular congestion would be to make an ongoing financial contribution to Fairfax County, for the County and VDOT to use at its discretion (ideally to alleviate said traffic problems). The amount of money Inova expects to contribute has yet to be determined.

Hall stressed that their traffic analysis findings showed that the hospital expansion would have minimal impact on traffic. "I'm not here to deny that there are traffic issues in this area," she said. But she insisted that local congestion problems are pre-existing and should be addressed now, not later.

Gum Springs citizens agreed, but still voiced anxiety that the instillation of traffic lights might only exacerbate the problem, not solve it. "We just have to be very careful and very sure," one resident who declined to give his or her name said, "that we work to fix the traffic problems, not make them worse."

Another resident said he hoped that traffic from the impending six-story parking deck could be intelligently routed out of the hospital super-block and onto the least problematic exit road.

Citizens were happy to learn that at least part of the development will be LEED Certified, or "green," and that over 40 percent of the expansion will be open green space and landscaped reforestation.

But some residents were still worried that the already dangerous roads surrounding the hospital and the omnipresent traffic back ups will only become worse with increased usage.

Inova is scheduled to meet once again with the Fairfax County Planning Commission on July 7th; that meeting is open to the public.