SEARHC opens $300M ‘space age’ hospital in Sitka
- Daily Sitka Sentinel
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
By Anna Laffrey
Daily Sitka Sentinel
Sunlight bounced off the new Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center’s tinted glass exterior Thursday as hundreds of onlookers gathered outside the main entrance for the 1 p.m. ribbon cutting that opened the roughly $300 million hospital building.
It was built by the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, the Alaska Native-owned organization that provides health care and medical services for all of Sitka and much of Southeast Alaska.
The ceremonial ribbon-cutting for the five-story, 234,528-square-foot facility featured a traditional blessing, a welcome and addresses by leaders of SEARHC and the Sitka community.
Charles Clement, SEARHC president and CEO of 14 years, said in his remarks that “this has been a real challenging project to pull together, beginning to end.”
“It has come to represent much more than a building for me,” said Clement, of Metlakatla. “It represents our commitment to our patients, our commitment to our communities, our commitment to our employees … who are providing care for our patients, day in and day out.”
SEARHC designed and constructed the state-of-the-art building. In 2020 SEARHC was selected by the U.S. Indian Health Service for the IHS Joint Venture Construction Program, which provides long-term funding for staffing and operation of the new hospital.
The new hospital is about twice the size of the building it replaces, but will have the same number of patient beds. That’s due to funding and licensure requirements, Clement told the Sentinel.
"To qualify as a critical access hospital it has to be 25 beds or less,” he said in an interview with the Sentinel after the ribbon-cutting.
The new hospital comes ten years after the city entered talks with SEARHC about consolidating the services provided by SEARHC and city-owned Sitka Community Hospital. After long negotiations and voter approval in a city election, the Sitka Community Hospital's buildings, grounds, and business were sold to SEARHC in 2019, and SEARHC pledged to continue, and expand, the health and medical services available to the public.
Health care has become the largest sector of the Sitka economy, with total earnings at $67.3 million (782 jobs) in 2024, according to a Rain Coast data presentation last year.
Growth in health care continues in Sitka. At the ribbon-cutting, the deputy director of the Indian Health Service, Benjamin Smith, announced that IHS will work with SEARHC in a joint venture to develop a new long-term care facility on the Sitka campus.
Clement told the Sentinel that the project would “replace the long-term care facility over (at the Sitka Community Hospital building) with a newer, larger facility here on SEARHC campus." Initial plans are for the facility to have 35 beds in the long-term care unit, up from the 19 beds SEARHC currently offers in a building at the former Sitka Community Hospital site.
In the interview Clement also addressed SEARHC plans in other Southeast communities.
In Haines, “right now we have a clinic that is quite old, and so the goal is to replace it and add some additional capacity there,” Clement said. “The direction is towards a small critical access hospital, based on the model that we developed in Wrangell.”
In Wrangell, “we're building a new medical office building to consolidate onto a single campus. … We have multiple facilities all over town, and we have enough land there to bring it all into a medical campus,” Clement said.
And in Klawock, “We're doing a lot of site work down there to get ready to do another clinic replacement, with a goal eventually developing, if we can make it work, long-term care and a critical access hospital there,” Clement said.
Meanwhile, contractors are at work adding six units to the SEARHC patient housing complex in Sitka, which already has some 17 rooms.
Sitka will remain a hub for medical services in Southeast, and continues to be the only SEARHC location offering labor and delivery services, Chief Operating Officer Martin Benning told the Sentinel.
SEARHC employs 200 medical professionals across Southeast, and has a staff of several hundred who run the hospital in Sitka; the new Sitka hospital will house “the same team,” Benning said.
“Everything that’s over at the current hospital is moving in here by the end of June,” Benning said. He noted that rehabilitation and behavioral health teams will begin operating out of the new hospital on May 4, and the Sitka Community Hospital will continue housing long-term care for the foreseeable future.
Chief Nursing Officer Jacque Quantrille told the Sentinel that “on opening day, day one, we’ll have the same services.
“We’ll be bringing other specialties on,” Quantrille said. “Right now we have rheumatology, cardiology, dermatology, ophthalmology." Benning added that SEARHC hired a hand surgeon to split time between Sitka and Juneau.
“As we expand and grow, we'll bring more people who will bring more specialties,” Quantrille said. “Some specialties are hard to support in rural Alaska – we won’t be doing open heart surgery.”
SEARHC hospital administrator Bill Spivey remarked on the new chapter at SEARHC that’s coming with the new hospital building.
“We have always provided unbelievable care to the patients that come to see us,” Spivey told the Sentinel. “But we’ve done it in a building that has been slowly but surely just coming apart.”
“To be able to continue that level of care in a space that is this amazing, it’s going to be very special,” Spivey said.
As for the future of the old SEARHC hospital building, and the Sitka Community Hospital building, Benning said that “We haven’t nailed anything down definitively, we’ve just been focused, ‘Let’s get this done,’ and then we’ll figure out, ‘What do we do?’”
Back at the old SEARHC hospital building on Thursday, long-time employees and patients gathered around cafeteria lunch tables to reflect on the history of the building that began as a naval hospital in World War II.
Corrine Brown of Kodiak Island came to Sitka in 1948 to attend grade school at Mt. Edgecumbe High School – when the Bureau of Indian Affairs ran the school.
Brown worked 37 years at the hospital, first in the tuberculosis wards downhill from the hospital, when it was operated by the federal government. SEARHC took over the hospital facility in 1986.
Elouise Kanosh of Angoon and Sitka also started with the hospital when the federal government owned it.
She worked there for 30 years, beginning in outpatient services, which were housed where the cafeteria is now.
Cheryle Enloe of Sitka, who worked in the SEARHC communications department for 20 years, remarked on the change to a new hospital building: “We were born here.”
Others present at the lunch table – old friends from MEHS, SEARHC, and growing up on Alice Island – recalled the births, and deaths, of their loved ones at the building.
Of the new hospital, Enloe said “It’s kind of unsettling. It’s like I’ll be lost.”
As the 1 p.m. hour struck Thursday, the lunch group migrated across a parking lot from the old, WWII-era hospital to the massive, glass-plated building where a crowd of hundreds gathered.
Kanosh wore a traditional hat made by her husband, William Kanosh, embellished with the image of devil’s club, a traditional medicine, which SEARHC uses for its logo.
After the ribbon-cutting proceedings Kanosh and her friends filed into the new building behind the Sheet’ka Kwaan and Gájaa Héen dance groups of Sitka.
They took the elevator downstairs to check out the new cafeteria. It features a large kitchen, and food lockers where people can pick up online orders.
One wall of the cafeteria is all windows, looking out on a landscaped path to the hospital parking lot.
“Oh my,” Enloe said. “This cafeteria is smaller than the one at the old hospital.”
“I wonder where that group of fishermen is going to sit every morning,” another friend remarked.
• This story originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
