Piedmont Augusta’s Summerville Campus will once again offer emergency department care and inpatient services at its 2260 Wrightsboro Road location beginning May 16, more than a year after closing its ED and converting to an all outpatient campus.
Services to be offered initially are a 24-hour, 15-bed emergency department, a 12-bed inpatient unit and new and enhanced imaging services. Outpatient services to continue will be a renovated occupational medicine suite and wound and hyperbaric services, diabetes services, laboratory, Coumadin Clinic, Piedmont Primary Care and Piedmont Heart in the Summerville Medical Building, according to a May 1 news release from the hospital.
“Piedmont’s model is to increase access to comprehensive care close to home,” said Lily Henson, M.D., CEO of Piedmont’s Augusta clinical hub. “Our focus is on changing healthcare, making it easier, seamless and removing the hassle. Offering another option for high-quality care by reopening the Summerville Emergency Department and inpatient unit is the right thing to do for our community.”
The campus is also home to Augusta Technical College’s School of Allied Health, which educates and trains students to become nurses and to fill other clinical roles through a partnership with Piedmont.
The former 231-bed Trinity Hospital became part of the then-University Health Care System in Augusta in 2017. The agreement preserved a valued community asset with an excellent reputation of caring for patients, while giving the system the additional space to meet the demand for services. While Piedmont Augusta’s Walton Way campus is nearing the limits at which additional capacity can be cost effectively added, the Summerville campus provided the land and building space to accommodate growth.
In December 2020, Piedmont closed the Summerville Campus Emergency Department and quickly converted the entire hospital into isolation beds to care for the vast majority of this community’s COVID-19 inpatients. When the COVID-19 inpatient numbers declined, patients and staff transferred back to main campus and Summerville was maintained as an outpatient campus.
“What we heard pretty quickly from our community is that they missed the efficiency of that campus,” Henson said. “We are completing some renovations now, and are excited about being able to give the CSRA another healthcare option with room for growth and added services.”
