Mission Viejo Trauma Center Grows While Others Limp Along : Health care: The expansion, which doubles the facility’s size, is seen as a risk during the recession. However, South County’s growth makes officials comfortable with the investment.

MISSION VIEJO —  South County’s only trauma center will double in size when Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center opens an adjoining five-story tower on Sept. 1.

The new building will also make the medical facility the largest in South County. The hospital will double in gross footage, expanding by 224,000 square feet and boosting its bed capacity from 214 to 374 beds.

Although the move is seen as somewhat risky during troubled financial times, hospital officials said Friday that they were obligated to move ahead with plans that were five years in the making.

“Like the hospital itself, a trauma center is . . . a commitment the hospital makes to its community,” said Dr. Thomas Shaver, head of trauma services at Mission Hospital. “We’ve just made a huge commitment to the community.”

Overall, officials said, the expansion is expected to have only a small impact on the rest of the county, which has seen the number of trauma centers shrink from five to three. The Mission Viejo hospital, in affluent South County, has a relatively low rate of indigent-patient care.

“The county trauma care system is still highly vulnerable, and Mission Hospital is just an oasis,” said Dr. John West, architect of the county’s trauma system and founder of the Orange County Trauma Society. “The big picture still has a lot of question marks.”

But in Mission Viejo, hospital officials were all smiles as they went on a walk-through of the new tower. The building will be dedicated in a private ceremony tonight and will be open for public viewing all weekend. The hospital will move patients into the addition beginning Sept. 1.

“All of our demographics and studies showed that South County will do nothing but expand in the future,” said Reynold R. Welch, chief administrator of the hospital. “As of this weekend, we will be ready.”

The tower will hold separate floors for obstetrics and surgery. The fourth floor will be held aside for future expansion, and the fifth floor will be reserved for a pediatrics wing called Children’s Hospital in Mission that will be open in 1993.

Welch said the hospital had outgrown itself, and the new space will be used in a number of ways not seen by patients, including more storage rooms and a place to put a new generator.

“It doesn’t seem real exciting to the public,” he said, “but there were a number of things we had to deal with that weren’t really conducive to the way we like to practice medicine.”

In the past, with little room to spare in the trauma center-emergency room, patients with severe injuries were sometimes in the same area as those with minor problems.

“Once in a while you’d get people on gurneys with tubes hanging out of them being wheeled through past people with head colds and sniffles,” Shaver said. “There’ll be a lot more privacy now.”

The tower will have a helicopter landing pad. Patients who are flown in will be wheeled off the elevator into a trauma center that will have more space for treatment areas and more beds for trauma patients.

Financially, Mission Hospital’s trauma program breaks even, say hospital officials, making it the strong link of the three trauma centers left in the county’s emergency care system.

The last hospital to drop its trauma center was Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center in December, 1989. Officials there said the hospital was losing $1 million annually on trauma care.

At the time, dark predictions were made for the future of the county’s trauma care system, now represented by UC Irvine Medical Center and Western Medical Center-Santa Ana, as well as Mission Hospital.

Despite an increase in trauma patients since the Fountain Valley trauma center closed, officials said both hospital are holding their own--for now.

“So far, we’ve been able to cope fairly well,” said Dr. W. Rand Hardy, director of trauma services for Western Medical Center, whose trauma patient load went from 1,000 to 1,400 after the Fountain Valley center shut down. “The next month, the next three months, we’ll be OK. Farther than that, I can’t predict. The whole medical system is having (financial) troubles, and when something needs to be cut, the trauma center is usually the first to go.”