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The 42-bed facility in Springfield will also serve patients recovering from strokes, neurological disease and other serious injuries. It will open in August, replacing and tripling the size of the current inpatient rehabilitation unit at Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend and freeing needed beds at the hospital.
Getting in and out of a drift boat requires balance. For those who have experienced a stroke or a brain injury, it’s a skill that needs to be relearned.
The drift boat is one of many features of a new PeaceHealth inpatient rehabilitation facility designed to help patients with their recovery.
The facility is intentionally designed for rehabilitation services and tailored to the Lane County community, PeaceHealth officials said.
“They’re coming to us at some of the worst moments of their lives, and we need to meet them where they are in the rehab journey in an environment that’s really designed to optimize functional recovery while maintaining safety,” said Ashley McDonald, a physical therapist and chief executive officer of the new facility, during a tour of the building Tuesday, March 31.
The hospital started the project in 2020 with construction beginning last March. The stand-alone 67,000-square-foot building is on International Way next to the PeaceHealth RiverBend Annex, just down the road from PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend. The rehab facility is scheduled to open Aug. 25, 2026.
When it opens, patients in the 27-bed rehabilitation unit at RiverBend hospital will transfer to the new facility, said Alicia Beymer, chief administrative officer at RiverBend. That will open up those beds at RiverBend, she said, easing wait times at the main hospital.
“There are days where we’re boarding 20 to 30 patients in our emergency department,” Beymer said. “So those patients will go up there, and we won’t have emergency department boarding.”
The plan is for staff in the rehabilitation unit to transfer to the new facility, where additional staff will be added to support the increased capacity. It will be triple the size of the current unit and will serve 42 patients to start, expanding to 60.
Lifepoint Rehabilitation will manage the facility, which will provide physical, occupational and speech pathology services. It will provide care for adults recovering from conditions such as stroke, neurological disease, brain or spinal cord injury and feature the first traumatic brain injury unit in the state.
McDonald said RiverBend currently provides inpatient rehabilitation services to people with brain injuries, both traumatic and nontraumatic.
“However, there’s a certain subset of pretty complex patients with brain injury that we’re not able to provide care for, and this now allows us to do that in our own community,” she said. “So folks can stay local for care.”
It will also allow family members and caregivers to be engaged throughout the rehabilitation process.
“It’s a team approach, not only with our clinical team, but with those that are going to continue to provide that support on discharge,” McDonald said.
Instead of sterile white, the hospital’s walls are painted in calming grey and light blue colors. The rooms are designed with rehabilitation care in mind, seamless floors, zero-entry showers, sinks and countertops placed at wheelchair height along with mirrors that are usable in seated and standing positions.
A 3,000-square-foot gym, currently containing construction supplies, will have a walking track, treadmills and specialized technology including a robotics-assisted weight-bearing and mobility device. The equipment is being selected with input from therapy staff, McDonald said. A small car will be available for patients to practice entering and exiting.
The courtyard, home now to construction equipment, will have raised garden beds, a bocce court, a putting green, ramps and different ground textures such as gravel for patients to practice walking on. That’s where the drift boat will be installed, with river rock underneath it.
“We’ve had patients who have come into our rehab unit who fish in the Northwest, and so they wanted to practice getting in and out of the boat,” Beymer said. “That’s just one of the ways that we’ve designed this to really be specialized for this area.”
She said the courtyard will allow the therapy team to offer options they couldn’t easily provide in the current unit.
The second floor of the facility will be a secure unit for traumatic brain injury patients and have a specialized gym.
The hospital will also have a simulated apartment where patients can practice independence alongside their caregivers, Beymer said. The apartment will include a flat bed rather than a hospital bed, a kitchen, laundry and a bathroom with a tub and walk-in shower.
“Really, anything that they may encounter at home, we’d like them to problem solve with therapy nursing here in this space,” McDonald said.
Beyer said PeaceHealth is also partnering with Lifepoint on its Timber Springs Behavioral Health Hospital, a 96-bed inpatient psychiatric hospital planned for International Way.