TECUMSEH - With golden shovels glistening in the Monday morning sun, scores of people connected to Johnson County Hospital gathered to celebrate the groundbreaking of a new wing for Tecumseh’s Critical Access Hospital.  

"We’ve had two-plus years of planning, and trying to get this right," said Carolyn Beethe, Johnson County Hospital's director of surgery and outpatient clinics. "When you’re doing something like this you want to make sure you get it as good as you can, and we’ve done that, and we feel like we’re ready, so it's definitely exciting to get going."

The added space will include a new operating room and spaces specifically for specialty physicians, giving the hospital more space to treat its current slate of patients, and making it easier for people local to this town of less than 2,000 to get almost any treatment they need without straying far from home.  

"I think the biggest thing is to be able to get high quality care, close to home," said Zak Tempelmeyer, Johnson County Hospital's medical director. "Patients are not going to have to travel for 90 percent of their healthcare needs. Obviously if somebody needs bypass surgery or something like that, those things are not going to be accomplished in a small town. But overall, people are going to be able to get nearly all of their specialty care, as well as everything else, locally."

Later additions will enable the hospital to process MRI results on location for the first time, and provide a remodel for some of the sections of the existing building, some of which haven’t seen any upgrades since the 1950s. There are other Critical Access Hospitals in surrounding counties in Southeast Nebraska, but officials at this one said the biggest impetus to begin this project was simply a lack of space.

"We just did not have the space available for the patient volume we have," said Johnson County Hospital CEO Mary Kent. "Carolyn’s done a fabulous job of building her program, and that's affected our needs."

"We’ve just really grown, and in order to continue providing more services and different services, we just need more space," Beethe echoed.

In total, an addition of 18,000 square feet of new space plus renovations to another 10,000 square feet of existing space will make this regional hospital more spacious, efficient and comprehensive, nearly doubling its footprint in the local area. 

"It allows patients to have one stop, kind of feel more at home," said Beethe. "The physicians, with us putting the specialty clinic next to the operating room, it allows them quick, easy access back and forth, it makes them more efficient and it makes them happy, and we like that."

"Needs change, and they grow. Medicine itself changes, so what can be accomplished or what needs to be accomplished change a little bit," said Tempelmeyer. "And our focus here, being able to expand that specialty care, is the thing that’s really needed in these smaller communities so they don’t have to travel extensively to get those things taken care of. "

"I think it’s just a direction we need to go to provide what we’re responsible for, in giving our communities, our area, what they need and deserve," said Kent. "It’s as much taking care of patients before they have issues as well as after they have issues, both of those things are just as important, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure we live up to the expectations of our patients."

Construction is expected to begin any day now. The first step of the process will be to reconfigure some of the parking lots and then officially break ground outside the existing hospital, with everything expected to be completed in early 2027.