U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff announced Wednesday morning new resources and funding to upgrade the hospital infrastructure at Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville.
Ossoff announced at 11:00 a.m. in a press conference at the hospital that he has secured funding for a new helipad and a dedicated elevator to be built with the new North Patient Tower.
“This facility is an asset not just to northeast Georgia, but to the whole state and also serves patients from Tennessee and South Carolina as well,” Ossoff said.
The current helipad for the hospital is located remotely from the emergency department. According to the Chief of Emergency Services for Northeast Georgia Health System, Dr. Mohak Davé, the distance creates minutes of delay that is vital to the patient. Patients that arrive on a helicopter are primarily trauma, stroke and cardiac arrest patients.
“With the patient arriving and going straight down to the emergency department, we're going to see significant improvements in those time-sensitive conditions,” Davé said.
Ossoff was able to gain bipartisan Republican and Democratic support in the U.S. Senate to get the funding that was passed in the Omnibus Appropriations Bill.
“This is really what my job is about, bringing Republicans and Democrats in the Senate together to deliver the nuts and bolts service that folks in the community demand and need to stay safe to be healthy and to thrive,” Ossoff said in an interview with WDUN.
Mayor of Gainesville, Sam Couvillon, said this would not have been made possible had it not been for the hard work of the hospital and their team. According to Couvillon, Ossoff was impressed by the detailed perspective from the hospital in the application for the grant.
“The senator was very gracious in giving local officials credit, but the truth of the matter is the credit goes to the hospital and their team,” Couvillon said, “[Ossoff] said our application stood out from the hospital's perspective of being very detailed, very concise, and it was a very clean application and justly it was rewarded to us.”
