Northwood hospital gets $25M USDA loan for facility addition, renovation

Mar. 5—NORTHWOOD, N.D. — A $34 million health center addition and renovation project in Northwood will get federal help after the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development announced a $25.3 million loan for Northwood Deaconess Health Center.

The loan comes from USDA Rural Development's Community Facilities Program, which provides affordable funding to develop community facilities in rural areas. In a press release announcing the loan on March 1, USDA Rural Development State Director Erin Oban said the Northwood Deaconess Health Center project is a "perfect example" of small-town leaders and the federal government partnering to help rural communities.

"Achieving greater access to quality health care is a challenge, and our rural communities experience that strain more than most," said Oban. "Improving and maintaining health care facilities and providers for rural residents improves health care outcomes for individuals and families, supports critical jobs for health care professionals, and enhances the quality of life in or near their hometowns."

Northwood Deaconess Health Center currently includes a hospital, clinic, nursing home, assisted living facility and an ambulance service. Brock Sherva, Northwood Deaconess Health Center's CEO, said the low-interest rate loan will help the health center complete a multi-phase project with one round of financing.

"It allows us to do everything we want to do in one shot — there will be multiple phases to the project, but we don't have to finance one phase, get that completed and then go back to the drawing board and restart the financing process," he said.

The addition and renovation project will serve as a full-facility update for the health center, which has undergone multiple additions and renovations in the past.

"We've just tailored our building and our space as community needs evolved, and there came a point where we ran out of space and built this hodgepodge of a building," said Sherva. "Now it's kind of working against us in a way — it's not promoting efficiency."

The three-phase construction project will update the look and feel of the health center, make the space more efficient and add space for new services.

The first phase of the project will renovate unused space in the building into new emergency rooms and build a 25-bed hospital addition, with nine acute care beds and 16 long-term care beds. These changes will bring emergency and hospital services closer to the nursing home, allowing for more staffing efficiency.

"In this model, we're going to have a true teamwork approach where if the nursing home needs extra help, staff can shift down there and vice versa," said Sherva.

The first phase of the project will also move the main entrance of the facility to a more accessible location and build an addition for physical and occupational therapy and a community fitness center.

Phase two will include a procedure suite for same-day procedures and renovate the facility's existing emergency space into a pharmacy, reception area and imaging lab. Phase three will finish aesthetic and accessibility renovations to the main entrance of the facility and spaces between wings.

After construction, the health center will have room for new services like computerized tomography scanning, endoscopy, colonoscopy, infusion, mammography, dermatology and orthopedics.

In the last decade, health care has shifted from a focus on inpatient care to outpatient care, Sherva said, and the construction project will help Northwood Deaconess Health Center to better fit these changing needs.

"This turns our current space, that's really inpatient focused, and brings it into 2023," said Sherva. "It's going to focus that space more on providing outpatient services — we're still going to have the inpatient services so that when people do end up needing longterm care or when people do need that hospital stay, we're still here to serve them, but we're not wasting space."

Northwood Deaconess has also received a $6 million loan from the Bank of North Dakota's Medical Infrastructure Loan Fund. The USDA loan and Bank of North Dakota loan make up the bulk of the funding for the project and the rest will come from fundraising and operational revenue, said Sherva.

Construction on the health center addition and renovations is expected to start in August of this year. Then, the project could take between 27 and 34 months to complete, said Sherva.