Nantucket Cottage Hospital Cuts Ribbon to Open New Facility

Officials celebrate the opening of the new Nantucket Cottage Hospital Wednesday.

NANTUCKET – Doors opened to patients for the first time Wednesday at the new Nantucket Cottage Hospital.

A ribbon cutting ceremony was held for the $90 million dollar building, which replaces the old facility built in 1957.

The hospital is the first in the state to get a total replacement in four decades.

The 106,000-square-foot hospital will feature state-of-the-art equipment and expanded outpatient service, along with inpatient care and surgery, providing a central location for the community’s health care needs, including primary care, emergency, specialty care and diagnostic testing.

The hospital features 14 inpatient beds, 29 clinical exam rooms for primary care, expanded labor and delivery services, a new heliport landing, a trauma room, five infusion bays, and 12 emergency examination rooms.

“Nantucket is small, but we can do big things,” said Dr. Margot Hartmann, the hospital’s president and CEO.

Hartmann said seeing the first patients come in made it feel like it was the birth day of the hospital.

“It’s a goosebump feeling,” she said.

Hartmann said the hospital is the main ingredient which allows for Nantucket residents to have a quality of life 30 miles from the mainland.

“People rallied to that story and that realization and it has been remarkable to see how the community has come together for its hospital and its future health care,” she said.

The lobby of the new Nantucket Cottage Hospital.

The project was paid for entirely through private donations, free of debt and with no taxpayer dollars.

More than $100 million of a $120 million capital campaign has been raised.

“This is the largest capital campaign for a community hospital in American history,” said Bruce Percelay, the chair of the capital campaign.

More than half of the number of donations came from Nantucket residents.

“The way people stepped up, from lemonade stands through multi-million dollar gifts, was extraordinary,” Percelay said.

Percelay said the new hospital is a legacy gift to the island for the next generation of residents and visitors.

“There probably is not one single institution on this island that has more impact than a hospital,” he said.

The hospital will house seven primary care doctors on site with 29 exam rooms.

The hospital regularly sees 10,000 to 12,000 emergency room visits each year, along with delivering 150 to 160 babies.

It averages 250 year-round employees with more seasonal staff hired for the summer tourist season.

Hartmann said the new facility will help in the hospital’s efforts to attract and retain staff.

“The costs of rapid turnover will diminish significantly,” she said. “That has already been true. Our recruiting has really become a pleasure.”

Hartmann said he heard someone ask if they are hiring during a recent community open house.

“I’ve been here almost 20 years and I’ve never heard that,” she said.

The next phase of the project will be to demolish the old building and construct a new parking lot. Affordable housing units for staff will then be constructed.

“Housing on Nantucket is a crisis and the ability to attract quality medical personnel without quality housing is quite difficult,” Percelay said.

The building will focus on more transient workers, including visiting nurses, experts from Massachusetts General Hospital and other consultants.

“This will provide really a first-class living environment that not many other institutions on the island are in a position to create,” he said.

The housing component of the project is not expected to be completed for about two years.

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