On Thursday, Elizabeth City resident Diamond Swain gave birth in the operating room of the decades-old Sentara Albemarle Medical Center building.
On Friday morning, she became the first maternity patient to move into the hospital’s new home on Halstead Boulevard — and she was stunned by the difference.
“Having a bigger room, you’re able to have more people come in,” Swain said. “Whether it’s family or children, I would say it’s an amazing feeling to have that.”
The $278 million hospital sprawls across 130 acres, with 90 patient beds. The new building includes eight labor and delivery suites, which allow mothers to give birth and recover in the same room with their newborns — a first for the facility. Each floor of the hospital also has a virtual nursing system that speeds up admissions by letting nurses conduct intakes remotely through cameras and speakers in patient rooms.
The campus is built to grow with the community, said Teresa Watson, president of Sentara Albemarle Medical Center. Inside, technology often seen only in larger cities now sits minutes from downtown Elizabeth City — a Da Vinci surgical robot that helps doctors operate with more precision, on-site dialysis and wound care, and a linear accelerator that delivers targeted radiation for cancer patients.
“While we have some other hospitals that are reasonably close by, you don’t have to leave your community to receive those services,” Watson said.
Above the maternity suites, the hospital’s intensive care unit forms one side of a triangular layout that allows nurses to move quickly between rooms. As part of the hospital’s central monitoring system, staff can use the virtual nursing platform to call a doctor for immediate guidance and access electronic medical records to enter orders on the spot.
“When I’m in my call room, I have a monitor where I can see the tracing of every baby that’s in labor,” said Dr. Lindsay Stevenson, clinical chief of obstetrics and gynecology for Sentara Medical Group.
In addition to new services, the updated facility aims to boost overall healthcare access in Northeast North Carolina.
“The challenge is having enough physicians for access, especially when you put a new hospital in, but this new building will allow us to recruit physicians, practitioners and clinical staff,” Watson said.
