Surgery at Pella Regional Health Center has been renovated to include an additional operating room.

Surgery Nurse Diane McCombs this expansion, which will be primarily used for robotic surgery, allows for better scheduling and flexibility for all of the surgical specialties who are providing care to patients.

McCombs says with Pella Regional’s growth in surgical volumes, expansion to a fourth operating room became necessary.

“Well in the last couple of years our surgical volume growth, we were around 17 percent last year with the year before around 30 percent,” she says. “So what we found was we were needing more rooms to provide the quality of care for our patients in a timely manner.”

Pella Regional partnered with Stryker and Intuitive Surgical to design the larger operating room to be a fully integrated room for multiple types of robotic surgery, the first of its kind in Iowa.

The equipment in the operating room communicates during surgical cases without the need for numerous wires, cords and other equipment.