Community Health & Wellness

74-bed tower now open at Silverdale hospital

St. Michael Medical Center unveiled its recently finished 74-bed medical tower during a ceremony on its Silverdale campus Tuesday, Dec. 9, ending a decade-long relocation of the county’s only-full service hospital.

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The north tower looms over the backside of its campus, connected to the main building via a fifth-floor skybridge. It adds capacity that officials with Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, the hospital’s parent company, say will ease pressure in its emergency department and expand access to specialty care.

Community members, left to right, Frank Reed, Andrew Welch and Ann Reed glance into one of the rooms while on a tour of the new patient tower at St. Michael Medical Center on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025.

Transition complete

St. Michael started placing patients in the tower Dec. 10. The new space, VMFH says, will allow for growth in spine surgery, orthopedics, obstetrics, cardiology, cancer care and other specialties.

“This building stands as a miracle in the health economy we have today,” Dr. Chris King, a surgeon at St. Michael Medical Center, said in prepared remarks Tuesday. “And I’m grateful for it.”

Completion of the tower marks the end of a long, often tumultuous period of transition for St. Michael Medical Center. Over the last decade, the hospital system has been in flux as it moved from Bremerton to Silverdale.

“This new tower represents growth,” said Kitsap County Commissioner Katie Walters, who represents Central Kitsap. “It represents a stronger healthier Kitsap.”

Five years ago to the month, VMFH began the first phase of a relocation plan, moving St. Michael from its longtime home on Bremerton’s east side — where Harrison Hospital had stood since 1965 —  to a pristine $540 million campus in Silverdale.

St. Michael Medical Center President Chad Melton glances up at the crowd lining the second floor as he leads a round of applause for the staff of the hospital during a ceremony for the completion of the new patient tower at St. Michael Medical Center on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025.

Plans to move at that point had been in the works for at least six years. CHI Franciscan, the hospital’s owner prior to a merger with Virginia Mason Health in 2021, had been applying for permits to build a hospital in Silverdale since 2014, according to Kitsap Sun Archives.

The Washington state Department of Health approved the move in 2017.

Pandemic-era struggles

The plan called for a two-phased approach that would relocate 242 beds from Bremerton to Silverdale. A majority of those beds moved in December 2020, when a new nine story, 200-plus-beds hospital and level III trauma center opened on Myhre Road. A 74-bed emergency room was left in Bremerton, with plans to eventually relocate those beds in a second phase.

Before that happened, VMFH abruptly closed the site in Bremerton for good the following year, saying severe staffing shortages put patient safety at risk. Staffing became a perpetual challenge in the follow years for the newly minted hospital, where the emergency room was frequently overwhelmed.

After the hospital opened, local fire chiefs’ publicly expressed frustrations about long delays for patients arriving via ambulance. Many waited 30 minutes to be admitted, some spent multiple hours. Employees also lambasted hospital leadership and a hospital union circulated a petition calling for many top hospital executives to resign.

Dr. Robert Ast, chief of staff at St Michael, said Tuesday that boarding — when a patient who has been admitted to the hospital stays in the emergency room or waiting area due to a shortage of beds — was an immediate challenge for the hospital, creating a backlog for patients, physicians and first responders.

Improving conditions

In recent years, conditions have improved. The opening of hybrid ER-urgent care clinics in Bremerton and Port Orchard, plus stabilization in nursing staff, have contributed to reduce wait times at the hospital. There still are some challenges with wait times, fire officials say. But the opening of the north tower should help alleviate pressure on the emergency department further.

“The opening of the tower will give us the opportunity to use our 52 bed emergency department, as a 52-bed emergency department,” Ast said.

One of the rooms inside the new patient tower at St. Michael Medical Center on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025.