Cape Fear Valley Health in Fayetteville Announces Major Expansion

Fayetteville is getting a major expansion to Cape Fear Valley Medical Center, as the hospital announced a new $110 million building.

The expansion will add 100 beds to the flagship facility on Owen Drive. It will be two new floors built on top of the current Valley Pavilion section of the hospital, where the emergency department currently is, along Village Drive. That will raise the Pavilion from five to seven stories.

"We recognized that we need this expansion to meet the growing needs of our community, and to provide meaningful assistance to reduce delays in our Emergency Department," Cape Fear Valley CEO Michael Nagowski said. "We expect that this will dramatically improve wait times in the ER."

The expansion will add an additional 187 full-time positions, according to Nagowski. He said the system has been saving for this planned expansion.

No closures are anticipated as part of the expansion, which Little Diversified Architectural Consulting and Rodgers Builders, Inc. will complete.

"It was a major consideration, because we need to be adding onto this facility while it’s occupied," Nagowski said. "During different phases of construction, there may be some traffic pattern adjustments around our entrances, but they will remain open. We don’t expect the project to affect traffic on Owen Drive or Village Drive at all."

Construction begins this Fall, and is anticipated to be completed in Fall of 2024. About 40 percent of the new beds are set to be ICU beds. The remaining beds will be medical/surgery impatient and observation beds. All of them will be in private rooms.

Two rooftop helipads are being added, which will allow patients to be transported directly to the emergency department by elevator. The current helipad requires patient transport from the front lawn.

"Our plan is that one of the helipads will be structured to accept Blackhawk helicopters," said Nagowski. "We want to make sure we have complete readiness if it was needed, because of our proximity to Fort Bragg."

This is the first major expansion for Cape Fear Valley since Valley Pavilion was opened in 2008. Outside of behavioral health beds, there are 524 Acute Care beds and 78 Rehabilitation beds at the facility.

Things have been stressful lately, so we got to wondering what the happiest city in North Carolina might be.

Finding things to be happy about may seem like a difficult task after two years of a pandemic, and increasing tension in Ukraine and other parts of the world.

But the folks at WalletHub.com put together a bunch of data to figure out the happiest city in North Carolina, and the rest of the country for that matter.

"Location plays a hand in how bright or gloomy our days are. For years, researchers have studied the science of happiness and found that its key ingredients include a positive mental state, healthy body, strong social connections, job satisfaction and financial well-being. However, money can only make you so happy – people who make $75,000 a year won’t get any higher satisfaction from more money. Consider also the fact that while the U.S. is one of the richest countries, it ranks only 14th on the World Happiness Report."

So what about here in North Carolina? WalletHub ranked the top 182 metro cities in the country on things like Emotional & Physical Well Being, Income & Employment, and Community & Environment. There were a lot of data points in each of those categories as well. Many of them revolved around money, but does money really buy happiness?

"In general, research suggests that above a baseline level of income, there is a relatively small relationship between money and happiness," said Alyssa Westring, Vincent de Paul Professor of Management at Depaul University. "Interestingly, researchers have begun to question whether it is not only how much money you have that matters, but how you spend it. When people spend money in ways that align with their personality and values, they tend to feel greater happiness than when there is a misalignment."

Crunch all the numbers together, and here's the happiest cities in North Carolina, followed by the happiest in the country:

Raleigh comes out as the happiest city in North Carolina, largely thanks to a rank of No. 23 in Emotional & Physical Well Being.

It's a big jump down to the second happiest city in North Carolina. The Queen City had even marks in the three big categories, with ranks of 61-78-68.

Durham got a big boost ranking No. 54 in Emotional & Physical Well Being. But the rank of No. 123 in Community & Environment hurt it overall.

A huge leap down from Durham finds Winston-Salem, which was hurt largely by a rank of No. 138 in Emotional & Physical Well Being.

Greensboro got a fairly decent boost thanks to a rank of No. 70 in Income & Employment.

It's not that things are all unhappy around Fayetteville, it's just that we didn't exactly score well in a lot of the key factors for this study. Fayetteville does rank as the least happy of the major North Carolina cities in the study. Just behind Fayetteville overall is Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham, Alabama.

Fayetteville also took a hit, coming in at No. 181 on Lowest Income Growth and No. 180 on Most Work Hours.

What about at the bottom of the list?