By HFT Staff

Effective May 16, Piedmont Augusta’s Summerville Campus will again offer Emergency Department care and inpatient services over a year after closing its ED and converting to an all-outpatient campus. 

Services to be offered initially are a 24-hour, 15-bed Emergency Department, a 12-bed inpatient unit and new and enhanced imaging services. Outpatient services to continue will be a renovated Occupational Medicine suite, and Wound & Hyperbaric Services, Diabetes Services, Laboratory, Coumadin Clinic, Piedmont Primary Care and Piedmont Heart in the Summerville Medical Building. 

The campus is also home to Augusta Technical College’s School of Allied Health, which educates and trains students to become nurses and to fill other clinical roles through a partnership with Piedmont. 

The former 231-bed Trinity Hospital became part of the then-University Health Care System in Augusta in 2017. The agreement preserved a valued community asset with an excellent reputation of caring for patients, while giving the system the additional space to meet the demand for services. While Piedmont Augusta’s Walton Way campus is nearing the limits at which additional capacity can be cost effectively added, the Summerville campus provided the land and building space to accommodate growth. 

In December 2020, Piedmont closed the Summerville Campus Emergency Department and quickly converted the hospital into isolation beds to care for most of this community’s COVID-19 inpatients. When the COVID-19 inpatient numbers declined, patients and staff transferred back to the main campus and Summerville was maintained as an outpatient campus.