U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff announced Wednesday morning new resources and funding to upgrade hospital infrastructure at Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville.
Ossoff announced at 11:00 a.m. at a press conference at the hospital that he secured funding for a new helipad and a special elevator to be built with the new North Patient Tower.
“This facility is an asset not only to Northeast Georgia, but to the entire state and also serves patients from Tennessee and South Carolina,” Ossoff said.
The current helipad for the hospital is within walking distance of the emergency department. According to the head of Emergency Services for the Northeast Georgia Health System, Dr. Mohak Davé, the distance creates minutes of delay that are vital to the patient. Patients who arrive by helicopter are mainly trauma, stroke and cardiac arrest patients.
“With the patient arriving and going straight to the emergency department, we will see significant improvements in these time-sensitive conditions,” Davé said.
Ossoff was able to win bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats in the US Senate to get the funding approved in General Appropriations Bill.
“That's really my job, to bring Republicans and Democrats together in the Senate to deliver the service that the people of the community demand and need to stay safe and stay healthy and thrive,” Ossoff said in an interview with WDUN .
Gainesville Mayor Sam Couvillon said this would not have been possible without the hard work of the hospital and their team. According to Couvillon, Ossoff was impressed by the detailed perspective from the hospital in the grant application.
“The senator was very kind to give credit to local officials, but the truth of the matter is credit goes to the hospital and their team,” Couvillon said.[Ossoff] He said that our application stood out from the hospital's perspective in that it was very detailed, very concise and it was a very clean application and it was fairly rewarded for us.”
