Copyright keenesentinel
Cheshire Medical Center is looking to the Monadnock Region to fund the remaining $2.8 million of a $42 million capital campaign that will help revamp the surgery department, the cancer center and West Campus, the Keene hospital announced this week. The money will help fund an expansion to the hospital’s surgical area and cancer center at its Court Street campus, as well as outpatient care on Maple Avenue, said Sandie Phipps, vice president of philanthropy and community relations. “It is time for us to both modernize and expand the facilities here,” said President and CEO Joseph Perras. “There’s a lot more technology that we need to fit into places like our operating rooms and our clinics.” Dr. Perras said renovating the surgical and cancer care areas, as well as some of the work on the Maple Avenue campus will cost “somewhere north of $60 million” and will be staggered over several years. According to a hospital spokesperson, this higher figure includes this initial $42 million. Perras said Dartmouth Health’s leadership supports the renovation, partially because the Keene hospital has been able to secure $25 million from an anonymous donation from a local family. “Leadership in Dartmouth Health wouldn’t be as supportive of us doing this work without the incredible early community support that we’ve gotten to this point, because the cost of medical construction is so exorbitant,” he said. The project will also be funded through “ongoing clinical and financial performance” as well as loans from Dartmouth Health, Perras said. Already in progress is the construction of space for a second linear accelerator in back of the hospital. The machine, which is used in radiation cancer treatment, will be the hospital’s second, Perras said. The addition of this second machine will create more radiation therapy treatment slots, he added. It will also create redundancies, allowing patients to continue their radiation treatment regimens locally even when one machine is down. “Radiation therapy is a huge burden for patients and their families,” he said. “They tend to be daily treatments for weeks at a time, and ... the nightmare of our machine going down or having delays in care or scheduled maintenance means significant impacts on patient care.” Construction of the space began in September and Perras said the hospital aims to open the area to patients in September 2026. The hospital’s perioperative facilities — including surgery suites, recovery beds and the pre-operative area — will also get an upgrade under Cheshire Medical’s renovation plan. The hospital’s five existing operating rooms will be enlarged to make room for robotic and other equipment used in surgery. The plan also calls for adding a sixth operation room and as well as another room that will eventually become an advanced cardiac care area, Perras said. The hospital also plans to add a fourth endoscopy suite in the renovation, as well as space for 17 more recovery beds. The expansion will enable the hospital to do an additional 1,000 surgeries as well as 1,000 endoscopies annually, according to Perras. In fiscal year 2025, the hospital did roughly 5,300 operations and 5,700 endoscopies, he added. An endoscopy is a procedure where a physician examines internal parts of the body using a flexible tube called an endoscope. The renovation will increase access to outpatient surgery locally, he said. The hospital’s cancer and gastroenterology clinics, which are currently in the same area, will be expanded and the gastroenterology clinic will be moved elsewhere, Perras said. The West Campus will have an additional 100,000-square-foot expansion to accommodate more medical residents. The medical residency program has two classes of interns and residents currently. With the addition of a third residency class next year, the program will have 18 doctors in training, according to Perras. The hospital’s Court Street campus is roughly 50 years old. The cancer center and operation department upgrades will be the biggest undertaking since the hospital building’s construction. The last time the hospital had significant work was in 2014 when it upgraded its emergency department.
