Beaumont's Emergency Center To Double In Size By 2017

ROYAL OAK (WWJ) - Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak is growing. The first shovels have gone in the ground for a new, expanded, state of the art Emergency Center.

Emergency Medicine Chair, Dr. Terry Kowalenko says they're nearly doubling the size of the current 70,000 square foot facility.

"We are going to be nearly doubling our current square footage," says Kowalenko. "We're going to be going to 125,000 square feet and half of the construction will be new and the other half will be renovation of our existing department."

Kowalenko says they'll be adding more than 100 private beds ... something patients and their families have requested, because one of the biggest concerns ER doctors hear about is privacy and noise.

Form and function is a big part of the overall design consideration:

"The design is even done so to be more efficient --we have central glass areas where the staff works so that they can have better visibility to the patients and it can also help us to either expand as the volume goes up or contract as the volume goes down at different times of the day," Kowalenko says.

The new Emergency Center is slated to open in the spring of 2017.