Putnam General Hospital (PGH) officially opened its new patient rehabilitation center last Friday afternoon with a ribbon-cutting ceremony arranged by the Eatonton-Putnam Chamber of Commerce.
Cutting the ribbon was newly named Director of Therapy Services Jana Weems, who took on the role after working the last four years as a part-time PGH physical therapist.
“It’s an excellent opportunity because I have great therapists that are already established here and working here, and it makes this pretty easy,” Weems said. “I mean, we have excellent room, excellent equipment, excellent therapists, so we’re hoping to take it to the next step where it’s something for the community to really benefit from.”
Joining Weems in the therapy department are D.J. Holder handling office duties (“She’s the one who keeps everybody in line,” Weems insists.), certified occupational therapy assistant Tim Belkins, physical therapy assistant Tequilla Reid, physical therapist Ryan Faircloth, and speech-language pathologist Brooke McMillen.
“If you’ve had a serious illness, maybe you’re older or somehow limited in other ways, our goals are to get you back to your home, to get you back to what you can do on your own, and to make you more independent and safer so you don’t have to go to an assisted living or a nursing home,” Weems explained.
“And outpatient therapy is vital for anyone who has a knee injury, a back injury, shoulder, ankle, because a lot of the times we say, oh, well, it’s not going to be that big of a deal. I can tough it out. Or I’ll just do these few things that I remember and it’ll be okay. And 50 percent of the time it is okay until five, 10, 15 years later, and then you never did address the underlying weakness. We can help you avoid that.”
The previous PGH rehab area was essentially a warren of small rooms where each patient was closed off from each other, making it easier for them to not fully participate and more difficult for therapists and assistants to keep tabs on how much and how well someone may have been working on therapy.
Hospital CEO Alan Horton said about six months ago, PGH began considering the effort and cost it would take to transform its rehabilitation facilities into a more modern, patient-friendly space.
“It was very compartmentalized, so the rehab staff said we could probably provide a better service and have the opportunity to grow our volumes if we had an open gym environment,” Horton said. “When patients come in and they see others exercising and doing some of the things that their therapist has prescribed for them if they see others doing things that they’ve been told to do, then it just encourages them a little more to try harder.”
The next step was to bring in some contractors to figure out which walls could be moved or removed in order to create a large, open, centralized “gym” space, along with how to lay out a few rooms around its periphery to house certain equipment or provide privacy when required.
“Then the question was, how are we going to pay for it? So, we went to the Foundation and described the project to them and they agreed to fund that for us and we started down that path,” Horton said.
In the meantime, PGH received a COVID grant from the state to help it be better prepared to treat COVID-19 patients. At a little more than $1 million, the state grant could help cover construction costs, but Horton explained the hospital first had to ensure it could use some of the grant money on the rehab center.
“The grant was intended to help us better treat patients or be prepared for a mass influx of patients, and a lot of these patients who have Covid, they become weakened, so rehab is a service that definitely could help them get through a Covid bout,” Horton said. “So, we were approved to use the COVID funds for this project and instead of having to use the Foundation’s money to pay that cost, we used Covid grant funds to pay for it instead.”
At completion, the new PGH rehab center cost approximately $90,000, Horton said, which he considers a bargain considering the improvement made to the patient care service it provides. Additionally, he suggested it may help attract more top-level talent to the healthcare jewel that Putnam County enjoys.
“We just had an orthopedic surgeon come by today (Sept. 22) to visit with us. He’s planning to relocate from Naples, Florida to this area,” Horton said. “We were touring him around the hospital, showed him the operating rooms, and then we took him down to rehab to introduce him to staff. When he walked in his first thought was, ‘Wow, this is pretty good.’ He loved the gym that we had here; he was excited that we had that kind of facility to potentially help his patients recover.”