The Mt. Grant General Hospital is excited to announce that it has received a $757,247 grant from the William N. Pennington Foundation to help build a new 3,000-sq.-ft. physical therapy and rehabilitation center.
MGGH has long outgrown its current outpatient physical therapy clinic, which works out of an old office building. It’s a couple hundred square feet at best, only allowing two patients in the space at a time, so this new state-of-the-art facility will do a lot to help better serve the community.
“We have a tremendous physical therapy team. Two groups work seven days on, seven days off,” says MGGH Administrator Hugh Qualls. This new physical therapy building will allow rehab doctors to be able to help more patients at one time, in its gym equipped with the latest physical therapy equipment providing firstclass therapy in Hawthorne.
“We have the only physical therapy services in the Mineral County area; the nearest other one is in Fallon more than 70 miles away. There are a lot of residents that need a physical therapy facility; we currently have 100 outpatients that need it. It’s critical for people to gain their mobility back from injury or illness, and there are a lot of older folks here who we want to keep walking as long as possible,” Qualls adds.
“This will provide easy access for folks with wheelchairs, walkers,” he explains.
MGGH applied for funds to build a new PT center in early January of this year, and the Pennington Foundation awarded the hospital the money in late February to be able to begin construction. The Pennington has had a long history of supporting MGGH; awarding it a $500,000 grant a few years ago to replace a lot of the old equipment and remodel its nursing home facility and then giving MGGH another $1.3 million two years ago for a new CT scanner/Mobile MRI diagnostics imaging technology.
“Pennington has donated $3 million to us over the last five years. They are very generous, very kind to rural hospitals,” Qualls says.
MGGH hopes to open the new physical therapy center sometime this summer.
