May We Help You? | A Message from CEO Dave Ressler

This month we will celebrate the completion of the fourth and final phase of our facilities expansion and modernization initiative that we began nearly two decades ago, starting with our obstetrical department and our nursery. Our Board’s vision for a state-of-the-art facility to serve our community endured through our financial crisis in the early 2000s and culminated in direction that I received while new on the job in early 2005—while we were still pulling away from the threat of bankruptcy. That direction, led by our then Chair, John Sarpa, was to start the design process for a right-sized and capable hospital that would meet the needs of generations to come with a focus on outpatient care.

The celebration will indeed be a very special ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 16, when we unveil our new main entrance and lobby, and a new and centrally located registration area (closer to our outpatient services). The new lobby will span the front of the hospital and will be an architectural and functional feature that will tie together the east and west expansions—its original 1977 footprint is now encapsulated within the expansion. Back in 1977, we had 49 mostly all semiprivate rooms, X-ray and laboratory departments, and an emergency room. Outpatient services were yet to become the standard of care. Today, patients can have most of their surgeries and diagnostics without being admitted and can go home right afterward.

A special part of the celebration will be the community’s role in making our plans a reality with two-thirds of the costs having been funded through a combination of $50 million in general obligation bonds repaid with property taxes approved by our voters in 2010, and $60 million in philanthropy. The rest was paid as we went, by saving our money and spending it wisely one phase at a time.

Truly, though, the MOST special part of the celebration will be with our staff and physicians as we also celebrate National Hospital Week and National Nurses Week this month. Facilities, equipment and technology are all essential to providing high-quality healthcare, as we have done for over a century. But it is the highly trained and dedicated healthcare professionals that we are enabling with the community’s support. We are ranked among the top 5 rural hospitals in Colorado, and the top 5% of all hospitals in the country for what we do, and it is our caring professionals in all our various delivery settings that make the difference.

Our staff and our physicians are our everyday heroes. Patients visited AVH and received care, diagnostics, therapies and other services around 80,000 times last year. They walked through our doors expecting and deserving the best, and they received it, without noticing the building around them as much as the kind and caring faces they encountered. It is these faces, over 500 of them, that are our most honored guests at our ribbon-cutting celebration.

-Dave Ressler