Seven Days VT: It started as a three-story brick manor on 35 open acres overlooking downtown Burlington. With a $400,000 inheritance from her parents, Queen City resident Mary Martha Fletcher financed construction of the original hospital on the hill in 1879.
The medical center has since mushroomed into a dense building complex. It has gobbled up other area hospitals — the nearby Bishop DeGoesbriand Memorial and Fanny Allen in Colchester — and sprouted satellite operations across the region that deliver health care to patients from Vermont and upstate New York. Three times the name has changed, from Mary Fletcher Hospital to Medical Center Hospital of Vermont in 1967, then to Fletcher Allen Health Care in 1995, and in November to University of Vermont Medical Center.
Now Vermont’s largest employer with 778 doctors, 1,660 nurses and 7,360 staff, the nonprofit hospital’s annual budget tops $1 billion. And it is still growing.
After a recent $5.7 million "rebranding," the UVM Medical Center wants to add a new patient tower to its congested campus. The seven-story addition, which required a change in the city of Burlington’s height restriction, would increase the number of private rooms in the hospital, from 30 percent to between 85 and 90 percent. Total inpatient bed count would stay the same at 447.
Price tag: $187 million….Click Here to read the entire article