by Lisa Hanchey

André Duplessis

After two and a half years of frenzied building activity, the dust is finally settling over the $65 million expansion at Women's & Children's Hospital. The revamped facility now boasts a 90,000 square-foot medical office building, an ambulatory surgery center, more patient rooms, expanded specialized care units and remodeled entrances and waiting areas.

Even with all the new boutique facilities and regional hospital buildouts around town, Women's & Children's was still juggling patients. "We run at a really high capacity level, even with the expansion," explains Chief Operating Officer André Duplessis. "There are many days when we have no beds available. And so, we have to do the best we can and move patients around."

Driving the expansion was the neonatal intensive care unit, which grew from 32 to 50 beds. Duplessis says that Women's & Children's NICU serves as a regional referral center for special needs infants from many of the outlying hospitals. The hospital has trained teams who safely transport premature babies or those with other anomalies from the outlying facilities. "We don't want to compete with those hospitals in the other small towns in Acadiana, but when they have patients that need a higher level of care, they are sending their patients to us," he says. "And, we're keeping more of the sick or premature babies, where in the past, some of those babies would have had to travel to New Orleans or Houston to receive care."

Also triggering the NICU expansion was the hospital's maternal fetal medicine program. Women's & Children's has two perinatologists, Dr. Scott Barrilleaux and Dr. Sheryl Rodts-Palenik, who are on twenty four-hour call for high risk obstetrics. "Because we are getting higher acuity patients, that in turn drives the number of NICU babies we get," Duplessis says.

The expansion also includes a 13-bed pediatric intensive care unit, a new antenatal (high-risk obstetrics) unit, an expanded postpartum unit, new operating suites and a new post anesthesia care unit. Additional labor, delivery and recovery rooms complete the package. There's even space for future growth — a shelled-in third floor on the new extension awaits the next project. "We put the third floor into our plans because we knew that this expansion would not be enough," Duplessis says. "So, our plan is to build out more patient care rooms on the third floor and concentrate on general women's services."

Another much-needed option was the outpatient surgery center, which is located in the new medical office building. "We were regularly running at full capacity in our operating rooms, and the financial investment to expand and upgrade the operating rooms in the hospital was too costly," Duplessis explains. "Instead, the outpatient surgery center was a great economical strategy to shift outpatient surgeries to that center, so that we could backfill our hospital operating rooms with inpatient cases."

Women's & Children's is now putting the finishing touches on the project, which commenced in late 2002. It's been a long process, but well worth the wait. "There are a lot of neat things happening here and our employees and physicians are truly making a difference," Duplessis says. "We are going to continue to grow. We're doing well in every aspect."