are against the hospital's expansion.
Hospital files suit
after city delays expansion plans
Miriam Hospital officials say their operating rooms and imaging equipment are so old that a significant delay in a planned $47 million expansion eventually could drive away patients and doctors.
“From a business perspective I think Miriam could lose revenue if we can’t replace the operating rooms and our diagnostic equipment,” said Claudia Gorum, director of facilities development for Lifespan. “People eventually will choose a different hospital.”
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Miriam filed suit in Superior Court on July 15 challenging a six-month moratorium on expansion projects that the Providence City Council imposed on the East Side hospital in June. Council members said the measure would allow the city to study how the project would affect the neighborhood.
In the lawsuit, Miriam is asking to proceed with plans to build a new surgical suite, which it says it has a legal right to do. It also is asking that the city pay any financial damages that the hospital says it has incurred from the delay.
Miriam received the OK from the state Department of Health late last year to proceed with a project that would replace its 10 cramped operating rooms – the oldest in the state – with 10 new ones. The $25 million project would more than double the hospital’s inpatient surgical space, from 15,200 square feet to about 34,000.
The plan calls for a new, three-story building along Seventh Street. The second floor would house the new surgical suite, and the third floor would be for ventilation systems. Two existing facilities – one is used for research and the other is vacant – would be knocked down to make way for the 49,000-square-foot expansion.
The hospital also wants to relocate its radiology department to the first floor, underneath the proposed operating rooms, along with a new cafeteria, conference rooms and a gift shop.
In June the hospital filed a certificate-of-need application for that $22.6 million phase, only to withdraw the application last month after health regulators said the impasse with the city must be resolved before beginning review of the radiology project.
The proposed building does not require an expansion of Miriam’s institutional zone, does not need a zoning variance and would not encroach beyond the hospital’s existing footprint.
Even so, the plan has raised the ire of some residents in the area surrounding Miriam. Signs reading “Miriam: No New Buildings! Summit Is Our Home!” have popped up in front yards around the neighborhood in recent weeks.
Miriam hosted an open house on July 23 to allow nearby residents to review the plans and express any concerns.
A number of neighbors say Miriam should expand elsewhere because its growth is encroaching on the nearby homes. The most logical place, they say: North Main Street, just down the hill, where the hospital already owns a few buildings and has moved some outpatient services.
“Instead of renovating and adding a tower in a residential neighborhood, why not move down to North Main Street, where you already have highway access and commercial development?” Summit neighborhood resident Michelle Tuck said at the open house, while observing a large map of the Miriam campus.
For many residents, the problem is not the most recent proposal, but what could come later. Miriam’s 10-year plan calls for adding a third and fourth floor above the proposed surgical suite for inpatient beds. That would make the building’s height about 75 feet, which is the maximum under the present zoning.
“Five stories is not appropriate in a residential neighborhood,” said Christopher Tuck, Michelle Tuck’s husband.
Alan Gilstein, chairman of Miriam’s board of trustees, said the moratorium has disrupted the hospital’s bid process for construction work. He said it is too difficult to determine how much the delay has cost the hospital.
Gilstein said the board worries that hospitals with modern operating rooms – such as Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, which opened a new surgical pavilion in 2001 – will begin luring away Miriam’s surgeons.
“Some of our physicians might feel that new ORs offer better equipment and more flexible scheduling,” he said. “The longer (the delay) goes the more damaging it is.”
Dr. Kathleen Hittner, Miriam’s president, said the hospital and its trustees
are committed to “being a better neighbor than we have been in the past.”
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