On Tuesday, Nov. 3, Tanner Health System broke ground on a surgical services expansion at Higgins General Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital located in Bremen and the only hospital located in Haralson County.
“This event takes me back to a time when Higgins General Hospital was very much in jeopardy,” said Loy Howard, president and CEO of Tanner Health System, to an audience of elected officials, city managers, board members, hospital and health system staff. “Rural hospitals struggled and Higgins struggled. They did not have access to capital. They struggled in trying to find enough physicians and skilled labor to be successful. And Tanner extended a hand of partnership, saying ‘we want to be your partner.’ That was something we had to sell to this community, something that we had to make promises for. If you remember, one of the big issues was ‘how much is Tanner going to invest in Higgins General Hospital?’ So it was decided that it needed to be $9 million.”
Howard reminded everyone at the groundbreaking celebration that he is “a numbers guy” before putting the commitment that Tanner has made to the hospital and the community into dollar figures.
“We’re very pleased to tell you that in 2003, we invested $7.5 million in the facility that you just walked through. We’ve also invested $9.5 million in equipment and various other improvements since 1999,” said Howard. “Our new expansion is an investment of over $8 million to insure that this facility is a state-of-the-art facility—especially in the area of surgery and outpatient surgery. That will be a total of $26 million dollars when we are done with this project, which I think is a remarkable demonstration that we’re committed to providing great healthcare in Haralson County, Bremen and the whole region.”
The new surgical services expansion at Higgins General Hospital will offer three operating suites, a special procedures lab, an endoscopic suite, a new post-anesthesia recovery unit (PACU) and new short stay rooms for patients to prepare for and recover from procedures. The project also will improve waiting areas around the facility and include a new Tanner Café for visitors and staff.
Construction will take approximately a year, and will proceed in several phases.
For the past three years, Higgins General Hospital has been ranked the No. 1 critical access hospital in Georgia by Georgia Trend. It’s also part of Tanner Health System, one of Truven Health Analytics’ 15 Top Health Systems for 2015.
Higgins General Hospital has been affiliated with Tanner since 1998. It is one of four current Tanner hospitals, including the 201-bed acute care Tanner Medical Center/Carrollton, the 40-bed Tanner Medical Center/Villa Rica and the 82-bed inpatient behavioral health facility Willowbrooke at Tanner in Villa Rica. In early 2016, Tanner will break ground on a fifth hospital, a 49,000-square-foot, three-story modern hospital facility to be built on the Tanner/East Alabama campus in Wedowee, Ala. Tanner also operates Tanner Medical Group, which offers specialty, primary and urgent care through more than 30 practice locations throughout west Georgia and east Alabama.
As part of Tanner Health System, patients at Higgins General Hospital have access to a wide range of services provided by the Tanner’s medical staff of more than 300 physicians representing 34 specialties.