Smith County Memorial Hospital (SCMH) has been a staple in Smith County, KS for nearly 70 years, providing a wide variety of healthcare services to the surrounding, medically underserved area. Operating out of a woefully outdated facility and serving a patient base that is comprised nearly 65% of Medicare/Medicaid patients, SCMH provides surgical, emergency, diagnostic, labor & delivery, nursing, occupational and physical therapy services.
Unfortunately, SCMH’s original 35,000 sf facility is nearly 70 years old as well, and has become entirely inadequate to meet modern standards for a medical facility: it is grandfathered into outdated Life Safety regulations, and its only ADA-compliant facility does not have a single bathroom. In the current SCMH facility, all inpatient rooms are forced to share bathrooms, and all patients must use a single communal shower room. Rather than undergoing a 9-phase, two-year renovation of its existing facility to bring it up to modern Life Safety code – and effectively halting all medical services during that period – in 2017, SCMH began developing a plan to relocate and construct a new state-of-the-art facility.
In early 2017, SCMH engaged Crescent to pursue NMTC’s as part of the financing plan for its new $30M critical access hospital, having already secured a construction loan from Kansas State Bank, as well as a take-out commitment from the USDA Rural Development loan program. In February, 2018, CGC and SCMH closed on $17.5M of NMTC’s, utilizing allocation provided by Community Hospitality Healthcare Services and Central Bank of Kansas City, leveraging a NMTC equity investment made by US Bank.
The new 61,698 sf Smith County Memorial Hospital will offer 16 inpatient beds, a 28-bed Long Term care unit, a 6,115 sf surgery suite, outpatient clinic services, radiology and lab services, cafeteria and food services, physical therapy, wellness facilities, and the required administrative, maintenance, and support services. Additionally, SCMH will carry over to the new facility all of its current programming and outreach programs, including its scholarship program, which covers education costs for potential nursing staff, lab and radiology techs, in exchange for full-time employment commitments after graduation.