HSHS St. Elizabeth's Hospital has moved from its campus in Belleville, Ill., to a $300 million replacement campus 7 miles away in O'Fallon, Ill. Hospital leaders said the move to a new campus was necessary because the old hospital was outmoded and inefficient, and because the new campus is closer to a medical corridor where many health care providers are locating their facilities.
Daniel Thelen was the first of 56 hospital patients transferred Nov. 4 from HSHS St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Belleville, Ill., to a replacement campus called HSHS St. Elizabeth's Hospital and Health Center, in O'Fallon, Ill. St. Elizabeth's President and Chief Executive Peg Sebastian, left, greets Thelen on his arrival at the new facility.
HSHS St. Elizabeth's is part of Hospital Sisters Health System of Springfield, Ill.
The O'Fallon campus houses a five-story teaching hospital that opened in November, with an emergency department, operating rooms, an intensive care unit, cancer care department, birthing suites and other inpatient and outpatient units. HSHS St. Elizabeth's legacy facility had 338 beds; the new site has 144.
Attached to the new hospital is a five-story medical office building. Saint Louis University Family Medicine Residency Program occupies one floor of that building. That residency program is sponsored by Saint Louis University, HSHS St. Elizabeth's, the 375th Medical Group at nearby Scott Air Force Base and SIHF Healthcare, which operates primary care clinics in the Metro-East area. The residency has 42 residents at any given time in the three-year program.
The shuttered Belleville hospital, an office building and parking garage will be demolished, and those parcels in downtown Belleville will be offered for sale. HSHS St. Elizabeth's is preserving some administrative functions and buildings on the legacy campus and plans to continue to offer primary care and other outpatient medical care, laboratory and imaging services, and physical and occupational therapy there.
An HSHS St. Elizabeth's committee oversaw the process of archiving and moving religious art pieces from the Belleville campus. HSHS installed wall-mount statues of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and of St. Francis of Assisi, a stained-glass window and a triptych depicting St. Elizabeth, along with crosses and crucifixes in the new hospital. Other religious art was donated to other HSHS hospitals, and to local churches and parishes. Some pieces were sent to the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis motherhouse in Springfield for storage.
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