Alaska Native Medical Center celebrates 10-year anniversary: building design promotes healing in holistic ways.

• Author: Maynard, Barbara

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As the Alaska Native Medical Center celebrates 10 years in its new facility, work is under way to expand the structure for the next 10 years and into the future.

"It's a 10-year anniversary for the building, and right now we are busting at the seams," said Hospital Administrator Daniel Jessop.

The Anchorage hospital opened in 1997, replacing an aging downtown structure operated by the Indian Health Service, which opened in 1953. Today, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and the Southcentral Foundation, a nonprofit health organization of Cook Inlet Region Inc., jointly own and operate the facility. This arrangement made Alaska the first state to have all of its Native health services managed by Native organizations.

130,000 STRONG

With about 350,000 square feet and 150 beds, the ANMC serves more than 130,000 Alaska Native and American Indian beneficiaries. In fiscal year 2006, the 193 physicians and 495 registered nurses on staff saw more than 386,000 clinic visits, conducted more than 11,380 surgical procedures and delivered 1,405 babies.

Jessop said the building has worked extremely well, but the space needs to expand to meet existing needs and to keep up with the projected 40 percent increase over the next five years in Anchorage's Alaska Native population.

"We are challenged capacity-wise," he said. "Right now, we are planning for what the next five to six years are going to look like. We are going to expand." Jessop came to the ANMC in February from Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu.

NEW DIGS

Expansion will begin within the next several months. The oncology unit will increase from six to nine treatment chairs, thanks to the conversion of a conference room to doctors' offices. The change will allow for a 50 percent increase in oncology patient visits, from 5,200 each year to 8,500, according to Susan Childers, chief operating officer at the hospital.

"That is sort of a temporary expansion because while we are doing that we'll be looking at constructing a building attached to our hospital that will be for chronic diseases, which will be mainly oncology," Jessop said. The new facility will be a separate wing of approximately 7,800 square feet, and is expected to take anywhere from three to five years to build.

The ANMC will also gain space in two years when the Anchorage Native Primary Care Center, located across the street from the ANMC and operated by the Southcentral Foundation, moves into new buildings...