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KIRKSVILLE, MO. -- Samaritan Hospital in Macon opens its new $20 million dollar patient care facility. 

On Friday, the hospital hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the occasion.

The 53,000 square foot facility has 25 private patient rooms, equipped with flat screen TVs and a private bathroom.  The first floor houses the new Emergency Department, along with a laboratory, radiology room, and several waiting rooms.

"It's arranged a lot better than the other facility was so it should be easier to maneuver through the building," said Bernard Orman, CEO of Samaritan Hospital.  "As much as our employees benefit, it also benefits the patients because they can find the services much easier than they could in the old facility and it serves them much better because of the private rooms and the services we are able to bring to them."

The mayor of Macon said the hospital helps Macon continue to be a thriving community that families will want to move to.

"The Hospital is a very key part of making Macon the kind of place that we would want to live and raise our family," said Dale Bagley.

Nurses working in the inpatient care department said the private rooms limit the relocation of patients and reduce the transmission of infectious diseases. One of them explained to us what they used to have to do before the addition of new private in-patient rooms.

"Before, when we realized that we have a call from the ER, that says we need a room for a female, and all we have are male beds," said Anna Blackford, an R.N. and Director of MedSurg at Samaritan Hospital. "We had to bunk up males with males to allow for a female patient to come up, or when we had an infectious patient coming, we had to bunk up all the non infectious patients to allow for an infectious room to be open.So now, all of our rooms are private. There's no need to shuffle the patients around to make room for somebody new."

The Hospital partnered with USDA Rural Development Agency, and Macon-Atlanta State Bank to get the loan to fund the project.

Renovations to the original facility are expected to be complete by August of 2012.