QUINCY — It’s not really all that much fun to move – packing, boxes everywhere, stuff to get rid of, a million details to attend to. Possibly it’s easier when the move is a few hundred feet, but it’s also harder when the old building is in use right up until the moment it closes.  

The new Quincy Valley Medical Center officially becomes the property of the hospital district Wednesday. And that, said project manager Joe Kunkel, is when the setup of and the training in the new building begins.  

“Up until now, the building technically has been in the possession and control of the contractor, and (April) 2 that changes where now it’s in control of the hospital. It doesn’t mean we can see patients because the building is not ready for that,” Kunkel said. 

Getting the building ready has been the subject of a lot of planning. 

“We started this planning 10 months ago,” Kunkel said. “We have one group (of QVMC staff) that deals only with the training and making sure we’ve got all the training figured out. I’ve got another group that’s just dealing with the logistics of the move – how are we doing, new stuff versus old stuff, and how is all of that working? And then we have a third group that deals only with the go live and what’s happening around that week of activity.” 

District officials get the keys to the building – an empty building – on Wednesday. It won’t be empty long, not even 24 hours.  

“On Wednesday, the first truck will show up with a bunch of furniture,” Kunkel said.  

About two weeks have been allocated to setting up the new facility, from signage to patient beds to artwork. It’s more complicated in the case of a hospital since some equipment must be available right up until 7 a.m. May 21, when the new hospital opens.  

Kunkel cited X-ray capability as an example. 

“We are moving the C-ray machine. We’re actually going to shut down the built-in C-ray a couple of weeks beforehand, and in the meantime, they’ll use the portable X-ray in the emergency department until the time we need to move,” Kunkel said. 

The QVMC physical therapy department, now located downtown, and Sageview Clinic will not be scheduling patients for one to two days prior to the move. Sageview will reopen May 21; physical therapy opens its doors in its new space May 22. 

The process of familiarizing employees with the new place starts in mid-April, Kunkel said. 

“We’re treating every single employee, whether they’ve worked here for six months or whether they’ve worked here 20 years, as a new employee because they haven’t worked in that building. Every employee gets onboarded and oriented to the new building as well as their department,” Kunkel said. 

Everything is an adjustment, he said. 

“There’s training that everybody needs, all the fire (and) life safety drills, the code drills and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “(In the new building) the fire alarms are going to sound different. Where you go when the fire alarm (sounds) is going to be different.” 

Training will start with a scavenger hunt for employees, asking them to find objects scattered throughout the building. The second phase is getting familiar with patient care.  

“We’ve identified 15 or 20 different patient workflows that represent the majority of the patients they see. We physically have a volunteer who (represents) the patient. They show up (and) we run through you through the whole process as if that’s (the necessary treatment),” Kunkel said. “We’ve got that for emergency patients (and) we’ve got that for inpatients.” 

The Quincy hospital is part of a network of emergency service providers, and the hospital is new to them, too. Kunkel said that’s factored into the training.  

“We will have times when the helicopter is here,” he said. “Because we want to practice the arrival and getting somebody transferred out on the helicopter. And we’re doing the same with the EMS folks. It’s not just in the building, but it’s also these relationships that we have, and making sure those work and are functional.” 

    Tom Richardson and Shannon Durfee of Quincy Valley Medical Center check out the patient lift in an early March tour of the new QVMC.
  

    Quincy Valley Medical Center project manager Joe Kunkel said the planning for the move to the new QVMC began about 10 months ago.