Sacred Heart Medical Center employees celebrated their last anniversary together in one location Tuesday as they prepare to open the new RiverBend hospital in August.
Back in 1936, Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace purchased the Pacific Christian Hospital for $50,000 and renamed it Sacred Heart General Hospital. Seventy-two years later, the hospital on the corner of East 13th Avenue and Hilyard Street will be known as Sacred Heart Medical Center, University District.
Nurses who have worked in the hospital for decades reflected on their experiences over birthday cake and lemonade while browsing through yearbooks from the nursing school the hospital once housed.
“I graduated from Sacred Heart in ’65,” charge nurse Lesley Stutz said. She flipped through a yearbook on a table in the main lobby, next to a hanging nursing cape circa 1963, until she found the portrait of a smiling Lesley Geijsbeek, as she was then known.
Her intention was to complete nursing school and then get a job back in the San Francisco Bay area, she said. But she met her future husband and has been in Eugene ever since. Her nursing school roommate still works in the area, and another classmate is still at Sacred Heart, Stutz said. This is her 43rd consecutive year at the hospital.
When Stutz began her nursing career, syringes were made of glass and needles were sharpened after each use. Newborn babies and their mothers were kept two floors apart in the hospital, unlike today, she said.
“There’s more emphasis on family now,” she said. “That’s part of the care.”
Sacred Heart currently delivers 2,500 babies each year, Stutz said. She estimated she has helped deliver 80,000 to 90,000 babies in her time at the hospital.
Stutz is one of about 2,500 employees who will move to the RiverBend facility. About 1,400 will stay at the current building, and 250 new jobs will be created at RiverBend.
“It’s kind of sad to leave this building, but it’s been a wonderful place to work,” she said. She will open the maternity ward at Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, a $367 million facility on 181 acres along the McKenzie River.
“I really believe nature has a lot to do with healing,” Stutz said. And with a picturesque view from each private room, she said it “couldn’t be a more tranquil setting.”
Sister Barbara Haase, who celebrated her nineteenth anniversary at the hospital Tuesday, said there is no comparison between the environment at the current location and RiverBend.
“Here we’re on a city street,” Sister Haase said. “The patients look out at the wall of another building.” Both she and Sister Monica Herran said a new location is necessary to serve the growing needs of Eugene and the medical community.
As the hospital’s reputation grew, new doctors came and eventually recruited others. Then specialists came and the medical staff grew, Sister Haase said.
“We were on a postage stamp here, if you will, given the size of the medical community,” Sister Herran said.
Sister Herran came here for nursing school in 1958 and graduated three years later. “It was a very good nursing school. We were well-disciplined,” she said.
She returned to Sacred Heart as an administrator in 1973 after serving in hospitals in Ketchikan, Alaska, she said.
Sister Herran said medicine has become more sophisticated in 50 years, during which time she saw achievements that were “not exotic” like today’s innovations, but were major breakthroughs at the time. She cited the pre-natal clinic as one such breakthrough that came after seeing women come to the emergency room to give birth without ever having received pre-natal care.
The new hospital will have three neonatal surgical sites and 16 labor and delivery suites, according to PeaceHealth.org.
Stutz, the maternity charge nurse, said she anticipates she will “maybe” retire at the end of this year.
“I keep saying that every year,” she said.
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