Vista plans $170 million investment in county

WAUKEGAN -- Four years after the announcement of a controversial plan to close one of Waukegan's two hospitals, a new health care company is declaring that not only will it expand services at both, it will build a third.

In a nwes conference Tuesday at Vista Medical Center East, the former Victory Memorial Hospital, Vista Health System CEO Barbara Martin announced plans to build a $100 million hospital in Lindenhurst and to invest $70 million in renovations to both Waukegan hospitals.

If approved by the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, the new 140-bed Vista Medical Center Lindenhurst will be built on the current site of the Vista Surgery Center on Grand Avenue. Plans for Vista East include upgrading cardiac services to include open heart surgery, and the expansion and modernization of the ICU, same-day surgery and New Family Center.

Martin said the hospital plans to move aggressively through 2008 to accomplish its plans, noting Vista would file with the state for the expansion of cardiac services and construction of the new hospital early next year.

Vista West, the former St. Therese Medical Center, which had been slated for closure by former parent company Victory Health Services, will become a 24-hour urgent care center and standby ER and will undergo expansions of current behavioral medicine and inpatient rehabilitation programs.

"Our vision is to provide quality health care for all Lake County and southeast Wisconsin," Martin told a group of about 100 hospital employees in the newly renovated lobby of Vista East. "We will be a two-hospital system in Waukegan."

Martin said a new hospital is needed as the population in north and western Lake County continues to grow. She cited projections for 20 percent growth in Wadsworth and 17 percent in Antioch over the next five years.

Lindenhurst Mayor Jim Betustak said he has supported Vista's plans for a new hospital since the late 1980s.

"Lindenhurst is growing very rapidly, like other communities in northern and western Lake County," Betustak said. "We need a new hospital."

The construction and plans for expansion will create an estimated 500 new jobs -- Vista currently employs 1,200 -- and an influx of property tax dollars from the for-profit venture.

The two Waukegan hospitals, along with other properties, were sold in July for $101 million to Tennessee-based United Health Systems Inc. The decision to close the former St. Therese was reversed last year after the plan met wide resistance.

The IHFPB approved a compromise plan allowing Vista to consolidate acute care at the former Victory Hospital while keeping the hospital on Washington Street open for limited use. Since then, Vista Health has faced a number of challenges, including long waits in its recently expanded 33-bay emergency room and an investigation into the ER death last summer of a Waukegan woman who was waiting for treatment.

State and local political leaders, who pressured Vista to keep both hospitals open and to ensure access to health care for all, lauded the new owner for both its plan and its openness.

"We won," said state Rep. Eddie Washington, D-Waukegan. "We're under new management and it's a new day. The staff stayed vigilant and kept hope."

"The morale of the employees -- the same people who were once ready to revolt -- is 150 percent better than it was before," said state Sen. Terry Link, D-Waukegan. "They have access to the executives and they're getting answers to their questions. We're confident the community will come back."

Ray Vukovich, Waukegan's director of governmental services, said the new company is in the process of earning back the trust of former patients who stopped using the hospitals in Waukegan during the consolidation.

"I hope it works," Jill Upton of Winthrop Harbor, who waited in the hospital lobby while her mother underwent surgery, said of the plan. "I've been in the ER a few times and it was pretty bad."