Munson Prepares For Record Expansion

Munson Medical Center is preparing to undergo the hospital’s largest-ever expansion – an $80 million project that will include the construction of a $36 million, 110-foot new Family Birth and Children’s Center.

Munson leaders kicked off the public phase of a capital fundraising campaign for the project Thursday at a Park Place Hotel event. According to Dr. David Wright, an OB/GYN who chairs the Munson Healthcare Regional Foundation Board, the hospital has already raised $28 of the $36 million for the new center during a “silent” fundraising phase with donors.

“The private phase has been going on the last two-and-a-half to three years…so now we have another $8 million to go,” Wright says. “The public phase of the campaign will probably last 24 months. I think the foundation staff is very confident they’ll be able to raise the $8 million.”

The new Family Birth and Children’s Center will stretch across Sixth Street between the main hospital wing and the Cowell Family Cancer Center. The expansion will allow Munson to modernize and consolidate its women’s and children’s services into one facility – much the same way the hospital previously consolidated its cardiovascular services into the Webber Heart Center and its oncology services into the Cowell Family Cancer Center.

The Family Birth and Children’s Center will expand Munson’s neonatal intensive care unit from 2,700 square feet to 15,500 square feet, changing the design from an open-floor unit to single-family private and semi-private rooms.

“It’ll certainly upgrade dramatically the standard of care for neonatal (ICU patients),” says Wright. “A quiet environment is the best way for very, very young infants to respond out of the womb.” The new center will allow Munson’s maternity and neonatal units to be located in close proximity instead of “opposite ends of the hospital,” Wright says, with Munson also building its first dedicated pediatric unit featuring eight beds.

“We’re not going to become a DeVos (Children’s Hospital, in Grand Rapids) or a children’s hospital, because we don’t have the surface area for that,” says Wright. “But I think (with the expansion) we can effectively take care of the population north of US-10.”

In addition to the Family Birth and Children’s Center, Munson’s $80 million expansion will also include $44 million in surgical, heart, and cancer service projects, including the construction of four new operating rooms and replacements for medical and surgical beds. The hospital plans to purchase a second da Vinci Surgical System – a robotic surgical used to perform complex, minimally invasive surgeries – and a permanent PET (positron emission tomography) scanner. The hospital currently only has a mobile PET scanner, which is used to monitor tissue and organ functionality and flag diseases in patients. Munson plans to use alternate funding sources, including capital expenditures and bonds, to pay for the remaining $44 million of the expansion.

Construction on the expansion is already underway. Munson is targeting an October completion date for a new three-story parking deck currently under construction at the corner of Elmwood and Sixth streets in the hospital’s former Lot A surface lot. The deck will provide expanded parking to support the new Family Birth and Children’s Center, among other hospital wings. According to Steve Tongue, Munson’s vice president of facilities and support services, the next step will be to vacate and relocate a portion of Sixth Street in spring 2019. Sixth Street will be removed between Beaumont Place and Madison Street to accommodate the new center. A new street will be built to reroute Sixth Street approximately 200 feet north.

Following that project, “the next phase of expansion will take four years to complete,” Tongue says. The surgery addition will begin in summer 2019 and will take approximately two years to complete. That will be followed by the construction of the seven-story Family Birth and Children’s Center. Though that building will be nearly twice the height of the 60-foot limit that would normally require the approval of voters under Traverse City’s Proposal 3, Munson received its special land use permit for the project right before Proposal 3 passed. The project therefore does not have to go to a public vote, since it preceded the charter amendment.

Tongue notes “there may be overlap” between the surgery addition and Family Birth and Children’s Center that could allow Munson to complete its expansion in three years, instead of four. “All of this is contingent on obtaining the funding we need for these significant capital facilities investments,” Tongue adds.

Pictured: Rendering of Munson's planned expansion