Honoring the 100th Anniversary of St. John’s Hospital

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to mark the special occasion of the centennial celebration of St. John's Hospital. For 100 years, this community hospital has provided quality health care to residents in the Saint Paul – Minneapolis Metropolitan Area.

In 1911, when it first opened its doors in Saint Paul's Dayton's Bluff neighborhood, St. John's German Lutheran Hospital was a 25-bed facility.

A new 65-bed fireproof hospital was built in 1914 on the site of the current Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul. During the influenza epidemic of 1918, St. John's Hospital was turned over to the City of Saint Paul to care for charity patients. In just one month, St. John's Hospital treated nearly 400 flu patients. In a turn of events, in 1933, due to a low patient load, the hospital was forced to close some floors and hospital staff took vacations without pay and a 10% salary reduction.

After weathering difficult times, in the 1950s St. John's Hospital underwent an expansion to 165 beds, becoming one of the first hospitals in the nation to create an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and was recognized for its "Progressive Patient Care." St. John's Hospital constructed a second facility in 1985 in Maplewood at its current location. St. John's Hospital joined the newly-created HealthEast Care System in 1986, along with Bethesda and St. Joseph's Hospitals. After 75 years, in 1987, St. John's Hospital closed its hospital on Saint Paul's East Side.

St. John's Hospital has implemented many innovations during the past decade. In 2005, St. John's Hospital was the first community hospital in the Twin Cities to offer the daVinci Surgical System – a robotic surgical system used to treat prostate cancer. In addition, St. John's Hospital was the first hospital in Minnesota to utilize digital mammography and one of the first hospitals in the state to provide cutting-edge artificial disc surgery for patients experiencing lower back pain.

Today St. John's is an award-winning hospital and with more than 1500 employees, one of the largest job providers in the East Metro Area. On an annual basis, it treats more than 41,000 patients in the emergency department, delivers more than 3,000 babies and performs more than 6,000 surgeries. U.S. News & World Report named St. John's Hospital one of 2011-2012 "Top Metro Best Hospitals in the Twin Cities" and identified St. John's as one of the top hospitals in the country for Urology. This year, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal named HealthEast Hospitals, including St. John's, one of the "Best Places to Work" in Minnesota for the sixth time.

Mr. Speaker, the comprehensive and state-of-the-art health care services provided by St. John's Hospital are commendable and deserve to be celebrated. In honor of St. John's Hospital's 100th Anniversary, I am pleased to submit this statement for the Congressional Record.