4 HEALTH COMPASS Fall 2025 Growing from 55,000 to 182,000 square feet means CMH will have a whole lot more to offer If you have been a patient at CMH, you may have noticed a few things: ● The Emergency Department is compact, and its nine rooms are often full. ● Surgical patients or patients from the Emergency Department who need imaging are wheeled down public hallways, in full view of other hospital visitors. ● Family waiting areas, the chapel and cafeteria are small and do not always have room for everyone who wants to use them. Patient rooms are also modest, and some have shared bathrooms. ● Location-wise, the hospital is close to the Columbia River and in a tsunami zone. A tsunami may result from a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. ● CMH is busy and offers quite a number of services in a limited space — but we have run out of room to grow in the facility we have now. What is included in the expansion? We get a lot of questions from community members about what the BuildCMH Expansion Project is bringing to Astoria. CMH will remain a 25-bed hospital, so many inquiries have centered on what changes will be made when the hospital more than triples in size. Here’s what you can expect. Emergency Department The current Emergency Department (ED) includes eight patient rooms and one triage room, with a total of 4,500 square feet. The new ED will have up to 24 treatment areas over 14,600 square feet. Surgical services Right now, our surgical services team works out of three operating rooms and one procedure room and has seven recovery rooms for patients. Those make up a total of 11,600 square feet. The new hospital will have up to five operating rooms, two procedure rooms, one dedicated interventional radiology suite and a whopping 19 recovery rooms — equaling nearly 28,000 square feet. We will more than double the space available for surgical procedures and recovery. Imaging Our Imaging Department currently includes MRI, CT, x-ray and ultrasound capabilities in 5,800 square feet. We are doubling that space to 11,938 square feet in the expansion, with a dedicated CT scanner in the ED, more mammography and ultrasound devices, and a room for imaging procedures, as well as an interventional radiology suite. Patient experience The chapel, family waiting areas and cafeteria take up just 3,750 square feet now. In the expansion, there will be four times that space (16,500 square feet) made up of a larger chapel and café, private corridors to give patients dignity, and outdoor terraces and waiting areas. Inpatient rooms Inpatient room sizes will drastically increase. All rooms will house only one patient. They will be located on What the BuildCMH expansion
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