17 new beds at St. Elizabeth’s Youngstown increases local patient care capacity
St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital and local Mercy Health leadership are celebrating after completing a 17-bed intermediate care unit and looking toward what’s next for local healthcare.
The new beds increase care capacity and the total number of patients able to be treated at Mercy Health St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital.
The intermediate care unit bridges the gap between intensive care and general treatment units, providing specialized monitoring and care for patients who are stable but still require a higher level of attention.
Kathy Harley, the CEO of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Youngstown, said this new unit has been in-the-works since 2019.
“While many people think this could be a knee-jerk reaction to what happened at Steward and Insight, it’s not,” she said. “You don’t flip these kind of initiatives on a dime.”
Cathy Ronci is the RNA manager at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Youngstown.
“The date that we opened we started accepting 10 patients,” Ronci said. “The patients that we’re seeing are acute, sick and a lot of them are coming from the emergency room department or stepping down from our intensive care areas.”
Ronci said she’s brought three new staff members onto the Mercy Health team to work in the intermediate care unit, including two nurses and a unit secretary, who lost their jobs.
“I’m very proud to work for a ministry that seeks to help those that need it, that includes employment opportunities,” Ronci said. “The importance of the beds are huge, especially for the people that we serve in our community and surrounding areas.”
Harley said St Joseph’s Hospital in Warren and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boardman have also hired healthcare professionals who were laid off from Insight Trumbull.
In 2019, Harley said they started looking at the strategic data that showed the Mahoning Valley needed probably more beds because of the aging population.
Once the COVID-19 cases were stabilized, Harley said Mercy Health moved forward with revamping the new intermediate unit at St. Elizabeth’s.
The floor was leased to an outside company that cared for long term, post acute patients.
“In December of 2024, we came in and redid everything except the flooring; all new equipment, the paint, the patch, everything to get it to to be a very nice unit, artwork included,” Harley said.
Next, Harley said her team is working on opening a 16-bed neurological intensive care unit.
“St. Elizabeth Youngstown is not just a level one trauma center; it’s a regional referral center,” she said. “There’s a lot of types of care initiatives that need done that aren’t trauma, like high level stroke care and heart attacks. ”
Currently, the hospital has a designed four-bed unit with four overflow beds for patients recovering from strokes and neurological conditions.
“We don’t always care for ourselves as well as we should, and that’s the consequence of it. Our stroke population is growing,” she said. “Because we’ve seen this neuro interventional program grow so largely, we knew we needed a neuro intensive care bed, more beds than what we had today. We wanted one that’s state of the art.”
