'Bittersweet' Sunday as St. Luke's, St. Elizabeth close, Wynn Hospital opens

The Wynn Hospital in downtown Utica officially opened at 6 a.m. Sunday morning with its first patient arriving in the emergency department at 6:30 a.m., while the pitch blackness of the night still hovered over the city.

As the darkness softened to a dark gray, a crowd of working staff, volunteer staff and media gathered in the hospital’s lobby, waiting for the first patient to be admitted to the new hospital.  All together, about 1,000 people were already in the hospital, some arriving as early as 4 a.m.

They wore T-shirts in about 10 different colors, each signifying their role for the day: nurse, lift team, registration. Those in green T-shirts with “Porter Team Wynn” on the back clustered by the door, ready to guide ambulance crews and their patients to their new rooms.

“For many of us,” said Mohawk Valley Health System President/CEO Darlene Stromstad, dressed in a skirt suit in the sea of T-shirts, “this is one of the most exciting days of our lives.”

Patients begin to arrive

Before the sun rose, ambulance crews wheeled four patients on gurneys through the entrance doors where a staff member registered them on a laptop and exchanged their identification bracelets before they were whisked upstairs.

The third and fourth patients, who were intended to be the first two admitted to the new hospital, arrived on the same gurney at 7:21 a.m. to the applause of staff.  Renee Delett and her newborn son Lincoln came from the St. Luke’s Campus where Lincoln was born on Friday.

Delett had been hoping to have her first child in the new hospital, but Lincoln had other ideas, arriving at just 36 weeks, she said.

Photographers and TV cameras captured the moment of their arrival, an invasion of privacy to which Delett had agreed. “It’ll be a cool story to tell the little one someday,” she said.

Another baby had been born at 10:01 on Saturday night, the last baby ever to be born in the hospital where so many Uticans have started their lives over the past nearly seven decades.

In the lobby, a series of signs point to a new era in health care in Utica: Bull Family Information Desk, Romano Family Lobby and Anita A. Vitullo West Concourse, a few of the 14 features, both inside and on the grounds of the new hospital, to be named after generous donors. And the largest sign, one lit up on the end lobby wall, pays tribute to the $50 million gift provided by real estate developer Steve Wynn, who grew up in Utica, and his family, who have a home in Old Forge.

Quiet transition

In the outside world, there was little evidence of the huge transition as the 106-year old former St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Utica and the 66-year old Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare hospital in New Hartford slowly shut down over the course of the day.

A group of ambulances stood outside the main entrance to each of the three hospitals, part of the mixed fleet from regional ambulance companies —Kunkel, Edwards, MOVAC, Old Forge, Kuyahoora Valley, Greater Lenox— and AMR, the nation’s largest ambulance service, charged with transporting about 222 hospital patients.

Every few minutes, one would pull away, either delivering a patient to the Wynn Hospital or heading back to St. Luke’s or St. Elizabeth for another pickup. No roads were closed, no sirens deployed.

At the Wynn, though, a delivery truck also pulled up to a back door on Columbia Street, unloading beds from the former hospitals as the patients who slept in them last night were transferred in the front door.

The beds would be cleaned and put back into service in the new hospital, Stromstad said.

Changing hospitals

Inside St. Elizabeth and St. Luke’s, hundreds of staff worked their last shifts, treating the last patients in the emergency rooms and getting the admitted patients ready for their journey downtown.

The orchestrated, quiet shift to the Wynn belied the magnitude of the change as Uticans said goodbye to two hospitals where their babies had been born, their loved ones had died and their families had been healed for their whole, or nearly their whole, lives; staff from two endlessly renovated hospitals and two cultures merged into one unified team working in a single, state-of-the-art facility; and the state saw a rare replacement hospital open.

Orange Regional Medical Center (now called Garnet Health Medical Center) opened in 2011, Corning Hospital (now Guthrie Corning Hospital) in 2014 and St. James Mercy Hospital (now St. James Hospital) in Hornell in 2020, according to the Hospital Association of New York State. And a brand new, but tiny, 20-bed hospital, Lockport Memorial Hospital, opened on Oct. 10.

Labor pains

The new hospital wasn’t born without plenty of labor pains along the way. In 2015, New York awarded MVHS $300 million to help pay for what ended up being a $650 million facility. The next year, the money disappeared from the state budget and the area’s elected officials fought to get it back.

The project was delayed as the state wrestled with how the health system could claim the money. Some area residents, including, most vocally, the #NoHospitalDowntown group, fought the downtown location chosen for the hospital, arguing that it would make more sense to build on the existing St. Luke’s Campus.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought new challenges as did the resulting inflation in the price of materials. The parking garage, being built by Oneida County, won’t be finished until March so the health system is offering patients and visitors valet parking, at least until the garage is done.

Registered nurses from St. Luke’s and St. Elizabeth, who had to vote to join the same union before the hospital opened, have been protesting the resulting contractual changes, which they say hurt some nurses’ income and benefits, and create disparities between nurses. (A settlement is still under negotiation, Stromstad said.)

And just last week, when enough work was done for the air system on the second floor, where the operating rooms and cardiac catheterization lab are located, to be tested, it turned out to be working, but not well enough to meet expectations.

With patient safety in mind, officials from MVHS and the New York State Department of Health agreed that major surgeries and trauma cases should be diverted until the system can be adjusted. Officials hope that will happen no later than Nov. 6.

In the meantime, any emergency surgeries can be performed in two first-floor trauma rooms or two fourth-floor C-section rooms. Elective surgeries, already paused for the opening of the hospital, will be delayed a little longer.

And the future of the now closed hospitals still hangs in the balance. The health system has been working with the City of Utica and Oneida County on redevelopment plans that would make it relatively easy for a developer to come in, but nothing concrete has been worked out yet, Stromstad said.

The move

The transition to the Wynn continued slowly, but steadily all day on Sunday. By 8:21 a.m. 14 patients had been delivered to the Wynn; by 9:20 a.m., 31.

By 9:30 a.m., a worker had partially dismantled the sign marking the entrance to the St. Luke’s Campus and threw a blue tarp over it, lest anyone mistake the campus for a functioning hospital.

Caitlin McCann, vice president of marketing and communications, put out regular emails updating the press on the progress of the move:

• 11:02 a.m.: 72 patients moved

• 12:10 p.m.: 98 patients moved

• 1:17 p.m.: 127 patients moved and the St. Luke’s emergency room was empty and closed

• 1:59 p.m.: “St. Elizabeth is officially closed.”

She beckoned reporters back to the hospital lobby at 3:30 p.m. so they could be on hand as the final patients from St. Luke’s were brought in. The day had gone without a “hiccup,” declared Robert Scholefield, executive vice president of facilities and real estate, and the man who played the biggest role in steering the new hospital through the planning and construction processes.

More: Wynn Hospital opens Sunday: What you need to know

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At 4:20 p.m., he got a call. The last patient had been loaded onto an ambulance; St. Luke’s was officially closed.

By 4:35 p.m. that patient arrived at Wynn Hospital and was whisked upstairs. The staff applauded.

The move was complete; Utica was a one-hospital city.

“Great day for MVHS,” Scholefield declared. “Great day for the Mohawk Valley.”

“To be truthful,” he then admitted, “I thought it would never end.”

When the project started, he had no idea how complicated it would turn out to be , he said, expressing his satisfaction, relief and pride now that all the work had culminated in a new hospital with more than 200 patients and a full emergency department.

By 5 p.m., only a handful of cars remained in the parking lots over at St. Elizabeth. The sign by its entryway had also been covered by a tarp.

The past and the future

Emergency room nurses Alicia Radley and Andrea Capron, of St. Luke’s until Sunday, volunteered to help with patient transports on Sunday. “It’s very exciting, a little nerve-wracking,” Radley said.

They both worked their final shift at St. Luke’s on Friday, a day Radley described as “a little surreal.”

The patients were feeling the moment. “Lots of patients said they’ve got history with the hospitals, the same way we all do,” Radley said.

And many said, Capron added, “Well, I had all my babies here.”

But they will both go on doing the same job, taking of patients, no matter which building they’re working in, Caprons said.

“(The Wynn) is going to be our new everyday,” she said.

Stromstad, too, noted the bittersweet nature of the moment as staff mourn the old facilities in which many of them worked for decades. But that sadness is paired with the excitement of having a new facility designed for modern needs, she said.

“This is the high of my career,” Stromstad acknowledged. “I have been involved in new hospitals before. This one is special.”

But the work isn’t done, not even the construction work downtown. A medical office building across the street from the hospital is expected to be completed by the end of March. A new parking garage being built next door to the hospital by Oneida County won’t be finished until the beginning of March. A crane sits outside it, easily seen from the hospital’s main entrance.

The health system will start work this week on the Kennedy Parking Garage, which is bought from the city, Scholefield said. Renovations to turn the former Utica National building on Lafayette Street into the home of MVHS’ physician residency programs will begin once the medical office building is complete. The Sister Rose Vincent Family Medicine Center on Hobart Street needs a new home, and the health system will evaluate all its physician offices to determine if they’re all needed and if so, what they need, Stromstad said.

The ongoing work, though, will take place with the health system based on a single hospital with a single workforce. Stromstad said the division was what she liked least about the old building. “We were all working in separate buildings and we spent a lot of time traveling between campuses,” she said.

The end and the beginning

As the patients settled into their rooms, the volunteers finished their jobs for the day and everyone waited for the first visitors, expected about an hour after the last patient arrived, people started drifting into the new cafeteria, just off the lobby. The seating area features blue-tiled walls and banquette seating the entire length of the walls. The serving area is striped in green, blue and yellow tiles.

On the far wall, the tiles were broken by the flicker of flame late Sunday afternoon in the wood-fired pizza oven as cafeteria workers prepared a free treat for staff to enjoy together.

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Wynn Hospital opens in Utica. St. Elizabeth, St. Luke's close