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Critically ill patients to begin arriving at Thomas Hospital by helicopter

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. — WVU Medicine President and CEO Albert Wright said he knew one fairly simple improvement that could made at Thomas Memorial Hospital in South Charleston was to add a helipad.

Albert Wright

WVU Medicine is in the process of fully operating the Thomas Health System, the previously announced deal officially closes on Dec. 31. Wright said he knew if Thomas was going to take care of sicker patients it needed a better way of getting them to the hospital.

“Anyone that would come to Thomas by helicopter had to be transported by ground from Yeager Airport,” Wright said Thursday just after a ribbon cutting for the new helipad. “When you’ve got critically ill patients time is potentially life so we needed to have a mechanism here to get patients to the hospital.”

The helipad is located directly behind the hospital’s ER in what used to be a parking lot. A HealthNet Helicopter was parked there Thursday.

Wright said it’s the first of many changes coming to Thomas. They’ve already promised additional intensive care beds. He said changes to the ER are also under consideration.

“We’ve got some folks looking at how we can expand and improve our emergency department and if we’re successful in that vision in the next six months I’d like to be able to announce we are going to build out a bigger, newer emergency department,” Wright said.

Meanwhile, Wright said there’s already been a lot of improvement in recent months in areas that may not be readily visible to the public.

“We’ve got a couple of neurologists who are about to join us. We’re going to start a spine practice here. We just hired a great vascular surgeon, a great nephrologist. As we bring on more and more physician sub-specialties, we’ll have programmatic growth inside the hospital,” Wright said.

There’s a lot of competition in the health care hiring market but Wright said Thomas is doing well.

“We are hiring a lot of staff from nurses to lab techs to radiology technicians to environmental service workers–the leadership team here at Thomas is doing a spectacular job in going out and recruiting people,” Wright said.





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