Plans for New Life Begin for Old OHH campus
As Olney Hamilton Hospital prepares to move into its new facility, planning has begun in earnest for what comes next for the old hospital campus.
Board members Kathie Smith and Lyndsey Miller recently met by Zoom with architect Norman Alston and his team to discuss the future of the existing hospital buildings.
Mr. Alston’s team is expected to spend several days in Olney assessing both the two-story hospital building and the one-story portion of the campus and interviewing people who may have a stake in its future use. Those discussions are expected to include representatives from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Division of Rural Affairs and its F. Marie Hall Institute for Rural and Community Health, Olney ISD, hospital staff, community members, and the OHH board.
The goal is to approach the old campus much as architects approached the new hospital: determine what the community needs and then figure out how the existing space can meet those needs, Ms. Smith said.
The team is also working on a financial model, structural timeline, and architectural renderings for the project. Hospital officials expect to bring in a building or systems engineer to evaluate the mechanical systems as part of the planning process.
Ms. Smith said the architects have already completed an assessment of what actually exists inside the old hospital — an important step because years of modifications mean the original blueprints no longer accurately reflect the building.
“They’ve finished that assessment,” Ms. Smith said. “So now we’re moving into more of the, you know, dreaming, master planning — what could be on this campus.”
Ms. Miller said she was impressed by the architects’ vision and particularly by their plan to involve a broad range of stakeholders in deciding how the campus should be used.
“I think that their strategy is gonna get a lot of people excited about our project,” she said.
No final plan for the old hospital has been adopted. The current phase is intended to identify possibilities and determine which uses are financially and structurally feasible once patients and medical operations move across the street to the new hospital.