Kalispell Regional Medical Center has entered the final weeks of construction on its new $42 million surgical tower.

Public tours are planned for mid-March at the new facility.

The new tower has four levels including the basement. 

It replaces the hospital’s Surgical Services space with new operating rooms, same-day surgery beds, offices, procedure rooms and other facilities. 

Swank Enterprises served as the general contractor for the 20-month construction project.

According to Operating Room Supervisor Jayne Wangerin, years of planning and research went into the design of the tower. She was part of a team that visited numerous hospitals and equipment vendors as part of the design process.

“It helped us to make really informed decisions, based on evidence,” Wangerin said in a press release.

The project was prompted by a need for space to accommodate new specialists, new technologies and a dramatic growth in surgeries. 

Surgeries increased from 7,987 in 2004 to 23,795 in 2011 with even more growth expected with the aging baby boom generation. 

Kalispell Regional now offers 12 surgical specialties: open heart, general, maxillofacial, neuro, orthopedic, plastic, thoracic, vascular, breast, gynecology, retinal and oncology. 

Each uses cutting-edge equipment and technology requiring more space than is available in the existing 400- to 700-square-foot operating rooms. 

Over the past 10 years, the hospital has doubled its medical staff. 

The first floor of the new tower includes 12,900 square feet for Northwest Surgical Associates, Surgical Oncologists, Northwest Gastroenterolgy and the central sterile supply department. 

Space was also reserved for phase two of this project — the renovation and expansion of emergency room facilities.

Seven operating rooms of 840 square feet each and one 1,036-square-foot open heart surgery operating room occupy the second floor, with four other operating rooms shelled in for future growth. 

Other Surgical Services facilities on the second floor include 18 same-day private room surgery beds, 18 post-anesthesia care beds, two endoscopy procedure rooms and two fluoroscopy procedure rooms.

Families will enjoy an improved waiting area with mountain views, televisions, a children’s play area and computer desks.

The third floor reserves 32,900 square feet — larger than half a football field — of shelled-in space for growth. The tower also was constructed to support two more floors in the future.

To accomplish this project, Swank Enterprises recruited local labor back to Kalispell from the North Dakota oil fields. Their paychecks brought an estimated $500,000 a month into the local economy.

Those workers installed 11,404 tons of red iron, 138 tons of rebar and more than 100 miles of electrical wire in building the surgical tower.