Health care in Newton begins just south of town, where Newton Medical
Center (NMC) has recently broken ground on a second medical office
building and a larger ambulatory surgery center. The medical center,
with its 103 patient beds, has watched demand spiral for outpatient
surgeries,
procedures headquartered for the past five years at a 25-year-old
facility a mile-and-a-half away. The new building makes solid sense, as
it continues the concentration of health-care services at the hospital.
Newton obviously shares in the national trend toward more and more care
being delivered in an outpatient setting, a trend that the new $12
million, three-story building will address with improved, far more
efficient logistics: lab tests, for example, will soon be completed a
hundred yards away from NMC’s lab. And meanwhile, the medical center’s
current operating rooms will be freed for more complex, longer inpatient
surgeries.
Local surgeons certainly had their say in the development of the new
surgery center, first of all in locating their place of work adjacent to
their offices, more than 55,000 square feet of physicians’ office space
per the architectural drawings. The surgery center itself (15,000 square
feet) comprises four rooms for surgeries, a fifth surgical room waiting
in backup and, should an eventual need arise, yet more space ready for
conversion to another two procedure rooms. Additional services to be
housed in the new building include outpatient rehabilitation —
occupational, physical and speech therapies.
As might be expected of an established and rapidly growing medical
center, NMC is home to the medical specialties most critical to the
community: family practice, internal medicine, emergency
medicine, obstetrics andgynecology, orthopedics, pediatrics, radiology,
urology, oncology, pain management, pathology, neurology, and
ophthalmology. Wellness programs play their large part as well, with
health fairs, childbirth classes, well-baby clinics, and support groups
of every kind waiting to help as needed. The topics of the moment are
the topics of a lifetime, from breast feeding to the
preparation of a living will.
NMC emphasizes programs and services that go well beyond expectable
patterns of primary and acute care. “Extras,” they’re called, and they
range from home testing for carbon monoxide to clinics in smoking
cessation, from computerized blood glucose testing to bone scanning,
from digital mammography to kidney dialysis, from sleep analysis to
transportation services. Last year, 4,382 patients were dismissed from
Newton Medical Center, their health-care needs served promptly,
efficiently, and effectively. And who can say how many more thousands of
lives were touched in the
extensions of that care? How the life and health of a growing Kansas
community can be made measurably better along the way?
