Highland Medical Center Completes Expansion

The Highland Medical Center first opened it’s doors in 1996, and has since been serving the healthcare needs of Highland and Bath counties and surrounding areas. During the last two years, the Medical Center has been undergoing expansion and renovation, which will increase the capabilities it has to provide needed care. Debbie Purdue, Executive Director of HMC, talked about the expansion of the building and it’s services.

“Highland Medical Center was able to apply for a capital development grant that has allowed us to double the size of our building, and to renovate the old portion that was completed back in 1995, so with those funds, we have basically built a new building.

“The grant that we received is from Health Resources and Services Administration. This grant was awarded to is in May, 2012, and before you can start to break ground, there’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of red tape that has to be taken care of prior to that happening, so we didn’t actually break ground until October of 2013.

“One of the things that we did was build two exam rooms and an office for visiting physicians – we have already a cardiologist that comes from Rockingham to see patients, and the goal was to have other specialists come to Highland Medical Center to see patients, so that our patients don’t have to travel so far. We’ve been able to expand space for behavioral health, physical therapy was expanded, our wellness area was expanded. We also have a community room that was built, that is currently being used by a couple different organizations. We did expand dental services too. We went from two chairs to five chairs, and that allows our dental hygienists to run two patients in a chair, and the dentists two patients, and then we have what we call “the quiet room” – but hopefully we don’t need that very often.

“Again, we’re just real excited to be able to provide space for the community, and for our patients.”

Contractor Lantz Construction of Broadway has completed it’s work, and the Center is holding an open house this weekend to showcase the revamped facility.

“We are ready to celebrate the completion of our building, and everybody has moved into their space, for the most part, and we are just really excited to be done. Our open house is on Sunday, May 17^th, starting at 3:00 and we’ll go through to about 5:00. We’ll have some light refreshments, and we are hoping to have lots of people here that were involved in the building of this building, and also we welcome anyone in the community to come by, and see what we have here, and what this community helped to build.”