Putnam
Hospital offers free valet service for now
By BOB CHUVALA
Patients and visitors to Putnam Hospital Center in Carmel
won’t have much trouble parking their cars over the
next several months during construction of the hospital’s
new addition. All they’ll have to do is pull up to a
kiosk and let a valet attendant park their car. For
free. “We’ve expanded our valet parking service so people
won’t have to search for parking spaces,” said Marjorie
Schneider, director of marketing.
The
valet service was begun in March 2005, but patients
or visitors had to show a parking voucher from a doctor’s
office or the hospital to be able to use the service,
or pay $3 for the service without a voucher. “We started
the valet service because we don’t want patients to
walk far distances to get to the hospital and outpatient
building,” she said. The hospital contracts out the
valet service and had the service add more personnel
during construction and eliminate the $3 fee.
The
parking attendants will help manage wheelchairs and
other equipment, install infant car seats, give directions
for destinations within the hospital and have umbrellas
in inclement weather. The service will also create more
parking spaces during construction because valet drivers
can double-park cars in valet areas.
The
hospital broke ground on its five-story, 113,000-square-foot
addition last summer, although actual site work and
construction started in the fall. The addition will
house the hospital’s new cancer center with radiation
therapy, will have enhanced cardiac services, a 125-seat
conference center for hospital and community use, physicians’
offices and 70 private rooms.
“We’re
moving 35 semiprivate rooms out of the existing hospital
and making them into 70 private rooms in the new building,”
Schneider said. That will free up 20,000 square feet
in the existing building for enhanced programs’ renovations
such as physical therapy, she said. “And we’re adding
about 300 new parking spaces,” bringing the total to
1,000 spaces, all of which are free.
“We
anticipate completion of the first building by the spring
of 2008 and we’ll then go into areas of the old building
designated for renovations,” she said.
Major
benefit
The
addition will cost $34 million to construct and equip.
The money will be raised through structured borrowing
and the hospital’s Campaign for Tomorrow, which has
a goal of raising $15 million. The campaign has already
raised $11.1 million.
Artist rendering of the addition being built at Putnam Hospital Center.
The
addition will not add any beds, but will add radiation
therapy for cancer patients, which will be “a major
benefit we will be able to offer the people in the community,”
Schneider said. “People who have radiation therapy can
take it four or five times a week for six to eight weeks.
It’s very intense and emotionally and physically draining,
so we want to keep it accessible to people. Their doctors
are here, we have a comprehensive program for cancer
care and we already do chemotherapy and certain types
of surgery.”
Putnam
Hospital Center with 164 beds is classified as a mid-sized
community hospital. Major trauma patients are transferred
to Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie or
Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla in Westchester
County. The hospital serves a market area of 150,000
people who live or work in Putnam County east of the
Taconic, southern Dutchess County and portions of northern
Westchester County. With 1,039 full- and part-time employees,
it is the county’s largest employer.
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