BRASELTON – Northeast Georgia Medical Center Braselton President Anthony Williamson said he would speak loudly in order to compete with the noise of construction crews outside the windows behind him.
That sort of challenge expresses in a nutshell the story of the new hospital’s burgeoning inaugural year.
“We opened in April of 2015 and we started construction in May,” Williamson said referring to the decision to add obstetric services to their menu.
“We have been living with construction essentially since we opened,” Williamson said about the $16-million expansion.
October is the publicized opening date of the OB section, but Williamson said he expects to be able to move that event to mid-September if things continue to progress. “I think it’s going to be more around September 12th, but officially we’re communicating October 1.”
That bit of good news was just one of many positive items Williamson presented to the South Hall Business Coalition Tuesday morning on the first new hospital to be built in Georgia in nearly two decades.
Statistically the hospital is outpacing their expected rate of growth and that has led to the challenge of staffing the complex.
“Hopefully folks in high school are looking at these opportunities,” Williamson said as he displayed a graphic listing the current employee needs, “as they think about great jobs they can stay in the community and grow.” (Note: scroll through photos with this story to view copy of job graphic mentioned.)
“We’re growing and we’re going to continue to need a work force here that can support our growth and hopefully a lot of that will come locally. If you know anybody in the healthcare world that’s looking for a job in Braselton, send them our way.”
Another challenge Williamson said the new hospital was learning to deal with that was beyond the scope of their early expectations had to do with mental health situations in the Emergency Room.
“It’s a little bit surprising, actually, to some folks in terms of the volume of mental health patients that present to our ERs…it’s a larger piece of ER-patient visit volume than you might think,” Williamson explained.
“We do have in our ER a ‘psych-hold room’ and intake coordinators from Laurelwood, which is our behavioral health program, they’re staffing here 24-hours per day…they work with the ER staff to assess those patients and get them to the right setting.”
“Mental health is a very big part of what we see in the ER,” Williamson said.
Williamson was asked if the patients being treated in Braselton we’re significantly cutting into the number of patients that would otherwise visit the Gainesville main campus.
“A little bit…but not much; we’re still extremely busy on the Gainesville campus…but most of what we see in terms of the zip codes that are coming here are exactly what we wanted, Flowery Branch, Winder, Braselton, Hoschton, Buford…those are our top zip codes.”
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