Next month, Valley Medical Center will mark the 40th anniversary of its opening on a hillside overlooking the Green River Valley.

In those 40 years, it has put on some square footage and changed its name, from Valley General Hospital.

The biggest growth spurt is also the hospital’s most recent. In early February, the hospital will open its new seven-story Emergency Services Tower and Level III Trauma Center right next to Southwest 43rd Street.

That $115 million expansion – about 197,000 square feet – will increase the hospital’s square footage by about half, to about 625,000 square feet.

The medical center’s campus includes privately owned buildings that are not part of the hospital itself nor that square footage.

The tower is the final piece of a $200 million expansion of the hospital that included the new Birth Center, the new lobby and the new Surgery Center.

The tower will house the hospital’s critical-care unit, hospital rooms and the Emergency Department – best known for its emergency room that today sees about 75,000 patients every year.

The sixth and seventh floors are vacant for now to allow for expansion.

“This was designed with growth in mind,” said Kim Blakeley, the medical center’s spokeswoman.

Helicopters flying in patients will land on top of the tower, rather than use the ground-level landing pad.

The hospital will still have more work to do once the tower opens. The final phase is what’s called the wintergarden connecting the existing hospital to the tower in a vast open entryway that will greet visitors. Its completion is planned for next July.

For now, ambulances and walkins to the emergency room are sharing the work area with the construction crews. In early February, the entryway to the ER will look vastly different. In fact, the current one pretty much won’t exist.

Also, the general public and ambulances will no longer jockey for space when dropping off patients to the ER.

Ambulances and medic units will bring patients to a high-ceilinged open entryway with its three lanes, visible from Southwest 43rd Street.

Those patients enter directly to the ER. Immediately inside are decontamination stations, where someone is cleansed of, say, chemicals from an industrial spill.

The tower will serve as a community disaster recovery facility, with a state-of-the art command center with decontamination equipment and a resuscitation room.

The general public will enter the ER waiting room through a new entry on the tower’s third floor

From there, private vehicles can then easily reach the parking garage on the first and second floors of the new tower.

Work began on the tower in December 2007.

“The challenge is to build the tower and keep the emergency room open,” said Marcel Desranleau, facilities architect for Valley Medical Center.

Desranleau recently took the Renton Reporter on a tour of the new tower.

The new Emergency Department has more than 45,000 square feet, roughly four times bigger than the current one. Like any ER, the most visible part for the public is the waiting area. The new waiting area – long but not particularly narrow – dwarfs the current one.

From there, patients are taken to the treatment area, which includes four triage rooms (there are currently two) and 45 examination rooms.

The Emergency Department is organized around four Clinical Integration Centers, what in the past have been known as the nurses station. They are color-coded – yellow, blue, green and orange – to create zones and make it easier to find someone.

All medical personnel, such as physicians, nurses, technical specialists and social workers, will work out of those four centers. The exam rooms are positioned around them.

The general color scheme, Desranleau said, is subdued earth tones.

The number of emergency patients could increase to about 100,000 in

a year, which of course depends on demand.

However, the larger facility won’t necessarily mean shorter waits for see a doctor or nurse, which is more a factor of staffing.

However, “that is our hope,” Desranleau said of shorter waits.

By design, the architecture of the new tower remains true to the look of the original hospital, designed by famed architect Edward Durell Stone.

Stone, Desranleau said, “always worked in true geometry.”

The tower will be lit at night.

A key goal of the new tower was to improve accessibility to the Emergency Department, which Desranleau says was accomplished. There are more ways to get to the ER, including through the garage.

The general approach to the ER won’t change, from Talbot Road, Southwest 43rd or through the tunnel under Southwest 43rd from the west.

Planning is already under way for the move from the current emergency room to the new one. That move will occur in just one work shift.

The new Emergency Department will include mostly new equipment. But some existing equipment in good condition will be used, but mostly for the complex of exam rooms on the far west side of the building. It’s expected that area will get the least amount of use, at least initially.