Piedmont reopens historic Summerville hospital in Augusta

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - Piedmont Augusta on Thursday reopened its Summerville hospital.

The hospital has long been a fixture of the community, but hasn’t been utilized as a hospital in recent years.

The facility at 2260 Wrightsboro Road was last used as an inpatient hospital during the COVID pandemic, but reopened Thursday after a ribbon-cutting ceremony heralded the occasion Wednesday.

“It’s just a new beginning for something that has existed for a long time,” said Nic Wood, executive director and hospital for Piedmont Summerville and Piedmont McDuffie.

Since the pandemic, part of the hospital has housed the Augusta Technical College nurse training program, and a few outpatient services have been available.

But services are being scaled up again with a 24-hour, 15-bed emergency department, a 12-bed inpatient unit, and new and enhanced imaging services – plus the ability to expand as needed.

Dr. Lily Henson, CEO of Piedmont Augusta, said: “Reducing an emergency room to the community meant that the other emergency rooms in the city saw more patients and so that just led to some overcrowding.”

Piedmont Augusta said it’s cut the emergency room waiting times at their main campus in half. Last year, they said their average wait time was eight hours and now it’s down to four hours roughly.

Jennifer Phommachanh, director of emergency services at Piedmont Augusta, said: “It opens a gateway. If somebody walks into the emergency department downtown, and they see it’s busy, it gives them an avenue to come here, which is kind of what happened in the past.”

While Piedmont’s main Augusta hospital on Walton Way is nearing its limits to expand cost-effectively, the Summerville campus has the land and building space to accommodate growth.

Outpatient services will continue, including a renovated occupational medicine suite, as well as wound and hyperbaric services, diabetes services, a laboratory, a coumadin clinic, Piedmont Primary Care and Piedmont Heart in the Summerville Medical Building.

“This hospital has served a lot of people who lived in the community for many, many years,” said Henson. “Closing it meant that they had to go downtown, which is two and a half miles away, but can feel like a really long distance when you’re not feeling well. It was an easy resource for our neighbors to access medical care quickly. That’s really something we wanted to return to the community.”

The facility originally opened in 1952 as St. Joseph Hospital. It had grown to 231 beds and was known as Trinity Hospital when it was bought in 2017 by Piedmont’s local predecessor, University Health Care System.

In December 2020, Piedmont closed the Summerville emergency room and quickly converted the entire hospital into isolation beds to care for the vast majority of the community’s COVID inpatients.

When the COVID numbers declined, patients and staff transferred back to the main hospital and Summerville was maintained as an outpatient campus and location for the Augusta Technical College nurse training program.

“What we heard pretty quickly from our community is that they missed the efficiency of that campus,” said Henson said.

The reopening won’t affect Piedmont’s relationship with Augusta Tech, a spokeswoman said, and in fact will only strengthen the college’s allied health campus.

The renovated wing is a different one from the wing used for Augusta Tech’s clinical training.

Since the Summerville inpatient wing closed, the local health care landscape has changed.

University became part of Piedmont, then Augusta University Health ed Wellstar, which has now broken ground on a new hospital in Columbia County.

Also, Aiken Regional Medical Center’s free-standing ER at Sweetwater emergency room has opened in North Augusta, plus Doctors Hospital has gotten approval for a free-standing emergency room in Columbia County.

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