Critical illness facility to open in Mercy Health – St. Charles Hospital

        Regency Hospital of Oregon, a new 31-bed critical illness recovery hospital, is officially opening its doors on the remodeled fourth and fifth floors of Mercy Health – St. Charles Hospital.
        A hospital-in-a-hospital, Regency will begin admitting patients the week of Feb. 7.  This new facility serves as a satellite hospital of Regency Hospital – Toledo.
        An open house was held on Wednesday.
        “Regency Hospital of Oregon will be a totally separate hospital from Mercy St. Charles,” said Marc Trznadel, the Toledo market CEO of Regency. “We are taking space within the hospital, but we will have our own Medicare number, our own group of surveyors – everything that is involved with an acute care hospital. It’s two hospitals in one location.”
        Regency Hospital of Oregon is a critical illness recovery hospital, licensed as a long term acute care hospital (LTACH). It specializes in helping critically ill patients breathe, speak, eat, walk and think as independently as possible.
        “We get people on ventilators off ventilators,” said Trznadel. “We have a success rate of 70-percent getting patients off ventilators. The hospitals just can’t get them off the ventilators. We also take patients newly diagnosed with renal failure and need more dialysis, or determine if they need daily dialysis, or, in some cases, get patients totally off dialysis so they can return to the community in the best possible health.”
        It essentially provides care for individuals with specialized needs, including post-ICU patients recovering from chronic, critical illness such as infectious diseases, surgical complications and other conditions including orthopedic, wound or post-trauma.  These patients may also require ongoing treatment for pulmonary conditions, neurological disorders, cardiac conditions or renal disorders.
        “Critical illness recovery hospitals are a bridge between patients in a hospital, especially in critical care, and a return to the community for a further level of care, such as inpatient rehab or skilled nursing facilities,” said Trznadel. “Or we take patients who have had a brief stay in a hospital, such as St. Charles, and we further their treatment and recovery.”
        The new hospital will hire over 100 full time staff, he said, including nurses, nursing assistants, pharmacists, respiratory, physical and occupational therapists, case managers, and dieticians.
         Regency has played a key role in the pandemic, decompressing ICUs by admitting and caring for recovering COVID patients, which allows short term acute care hospitals, such as Mercy Health – St. Charles, to admit more acute patients.