Brian Branmann
Dignity Health – St. Rose Dominican is understandably proud of its legacy in Henderson, well before the city was incorporated, and our dynamic, expanding relationship with the rest of Southern Nevada.
Our roots began with Henderson’s post-World War II legacy. Henderson’s future was in question when a group of Adrian Dominican religious sisters from Adrian, Mich., purchased the former Basic Magnesium Hospital for $1 from the federal government. The sisters renamed the hospital Rose de Lima, in honor of the Catholic saint. At the time, Henderson was a small town, miles away from the bright lights of Las Vegas.
Today, St. Rose remains the only acute-care hospital provider in Henderson, with two locations — the Rose de Lima and Siena campuses — and our San Martin campus in Las Vegas. In 2000, our Siena campus was built in a large, vacant field on what is now the corner of St. Rose Parkway and Eastern Avenue. Almost immediately, the hospital had surpassed capacity and the need to expand was imminent.
In 2014, our latest addition to serve the needs of that community (the five-story, 227,000 square foot Dominican Tower) broke ground and the project will be complete later this year. This September, we opened a brand-new ER, more than twice the size of our old one, and it includes a larger, dedicated children’s ER. In addition, this expansion includes a dedicated area for outpatient cardiovascular services. Later this year, we will unveil four additional floors in the new tower, offering 96 new private rooms, six additional operating suites, an additional intensive care unit, a larger rehabilitation unit with two new gyms and PET scan. Once the Dominican Tower is complete, the original Adrian Tower will get updates to make it look more like the new construction.
We also continue to enhance and invest in our original home, the Rose de Lima Campus. Rose de Lima is undergoing an extensive, multiyear facelift with a long list of improvements to its physical plant. We want members of the community we serve to immediately sense the difference in our focus on patient experience, and the best-possible outcomes, makes the moment they visit our campuses.
The Siena expansion project is far from our only effort to improve the health of Southern Nevadans. Our Barbara Greenspun WomensCare Centers of Excellence, which offer hundreds of health programs and serve more than 80,000 annually, recently opened a third location in Henderson to further expand availability and programs. The WomensCare Centers offer everything from diabetes management programs to nutrition counseling to tai chi and yoga, all of which are low-cost or free.
Health care is in constant change and population health and prevention is the new focus. With the programs offered at our WomensCare Centers, primary care physicians and other clinicians at Dignity Health Medical Group, and through innovative programs like the St. Rose Quality Care Network, a physician-driven, physician-led clinical integration program with more than 600 local participating physicians, we are looking toward the future. St. Rose is also a part of a joint venture with a local surgery center because more and more is done outside of a hospital setting. And for when it’s necessary, our home health and hospice services are there for our patients when they need it most.
Still, there will always be a need for acute-care hospitals for the critically ill. St. Rose is here for our patients through every step of their medical journey. Our history and ministry shows that we’re here to serve others and to extend humankindness to everyone we see. We’ve been doing that since 1947 and will continue that tradition in the years to come.