PORTLAND, Maine — Maine Medical Center is proposing a half-billion-dollar expansion that would significantly increase the hospital’s footprint in Portland.
The expansion — the hospital’s largest — would include a new wing and add two floors to an existing building, creating 20 new operating rooms and 128 new patient rooms. But the $512 million additions would not increase the total number of hospital beds, which would remain at 637, as the Portland Press Herald first reported Tuesday evening.
Instead, many of the existing patient rooms would be converted from double to single occupancy, a shift Chief Medical Officer Joel Botler said will allow the hospital to more efficiently use the beds it has.
“We start our day with either a handful of available beds or none at all,” Botler said in a news release. “The lack of available beds routinely backs up our emergency department as patients wait there for an in-patient bed to become available.”
Because of increased use of outpatient treatment centers, “patients admitted to a hospital today are, on average, sicker than those in the past” and can less frequently be placed in rooms with another patient, according to the release.
Maine Med would need approval from state and municipal governments to undertake the expansion, a process it expects to take a year or more. Construction would take four more years. The project would add two large buildings, including a 1,200-space parking garage, on Congress Street, tack floors to two others, and move the hospital’s helipad from its present location to the top of the facility’s easternmost building.
Roughly $250 million of the project would be paid for through fundraising and tapping Maine Med’s existing financial reserves, and the hospital would take out debt to cover the other half, according to the statement. Roughly one-tenth of the total investment would go toward primary and specialty care facilities in the hospital.
Over the last decade the hospital has undertaken two other significant expansions, which added more operating rooms and the eastern building that houses the hospital’s maternity ward.