PORT ANGELES — A 42,000-square-foot medical office building under construction on the Olympic Medical Center campus will attract doctors to Clallam County, Eric Lewis, the hospital’s chief executive officer, said Tuesday morning during a groundbreaking ceremony.
“The medical office building will really help us recruit and retain physicians,” Lewis said.
“They want to see where they are going to practice, and they really appreciate having a building that reflects the quality of care they provide.”
The $16.2 million project, built by Kirtley-Cole Associates LLC of Everett, will include examination rooms, doctors’ offices, laboratories and primary-care and urgent-care clinics.
“It will be really state-of-the-art,” Lewis said.
“We have tried to design a medical office building for the next 50 years, not based on what currently people have.”
Convincing doctors to relocate to Clallam County has been difficult in the past because of inadequate infrastructure, Lewis said.
“We’ve really had no buildings. Right now, if five physicians show up and say they wanted to work here, we would have no place for them to work,” Lewis said.
The new building “will give us the capacity to grow, and it will give physicians a professional building which will give them a great place to practice,” he said.
And that will benefit area residents who “will be able to get the top-quality health care services locally, and that has always been our goal,” he added.
“We will have more primary care access. We will have a walk-in clinic for urgent primary care. We will have more specialty physicians and surgeons,” Lewis said.
“People will have options of staying local and getting the care they need.”
Following comments Tuesday morning to about 50 guests at the construction site, Lewis, Olympic Medical Center commissioners, Port Angeles City Councilwoman Cherie Kidd and City Manager Dan McKeen used golden shovels to symbolically mark groundbreaking efforts at the site by digging into a pile of dirt.
“It is a thrill for me to be here on behalf of the city of Port Angeles and to partner with such a wonderful, wonderful community project,” Kidd said.
“This is just great. We talked about this for years, and it is so exciting to be here at the groundbreaking.”
Lewis agreed.
“This is a big step forward,” he said.
“We have been acquiring land for the last 16 years to make this project possible. It just was a process that took time, but it was well worth the wait.”
It “is exciting because we are finally able to expand our facilities to meet the community’s health care needs,” he said.
Construction at the site began in early August. Some $70,000 worth of improvements to sewer and stormwater systems are still underway.
Contractors have been razing buildings on the block and relocating utility lines.
“We still have more infrastructure to go,” Lewis said.
“We are burying the electric wires and telephone wires.”
Construction crews are beginning the process of digging out the basement area for the new building, Lewis said.
The project has required temporary traffic and parking revisions in the block bounded by Georgiana, Race and Washington streets, across Caroline Street from the main hospital, according to Eric Walrath, project manager for the city.
The building is expected to be completed in October 2016, Lewis said.
“We are looking forward to the ribbon-cutting and opening up that building.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
