Right now, it is the only full-service hospital in West Valley City. 

While it will likely lose that unofficial designation in a few years, Holy Cross Hospital-West Valley is forging ahead with capital and other improvements to upgrade its facilities and quality of care. So far, its parent company Common Spirit Health has invested at least $5.5 million to bring more modern equipment and services to the hospital. 

“It’s been quite a dynamic process around our investments,” hospital president Christine McSweeney said. She said that it became apparent after the purchase of the hospital that quite a bit of money was going to be needed to bring the facility, which originally opened as Pioneer Valley Hospital in the early 1980s, up to modern medical and infrastructure standards. 

The hospital’s top executive listed several types of medical equipment have been added, upgraded, or replaced at the medical campus at 3460 S. 4155 West. 

• Ventilators, which help patients breathe. 
• Stress machines to help test for heart conditions.
• Anesthesia machines. 
• Nuclear medicine camera, which scans and photographs the inside of the body. 
• Two new boilers to heat water.
• A new MRI machine, which alone cost $3 million. 
• Backup power generators. 
• New roofing. 
• Remodel of the main lobby.
• The addition of a small chapel for religious services.
• New elevators. 
• Telemetry monitoring systems “that help monitor heart rates and vital signs,” McSweeney described. “When we got here, those things were ineffective. They would monitor inconsistently. We had to replace all of that.”

“There is so much more to do, but in the two years, I would say this has been the most critical to maintain what we would consider standard of care,” McSweeney said. 

Holy Cross Hospital is currently licensed for 102 beds with a quarter of that for adult inpatient behavioral health patients. “At this point, we’re not totally at capacity. We want to make sure we fill these beds before we would expand,” she explained. 

McSweeney says an advantage of Holy Cross Hospital's relatively small size compared to large institutions like Intermountain Health’s Intermountain Medical Center in Murray and University Hospital on the edge of the University of Utah campus is an advantage in terms of personal attention to the needs of patients. “We get that (comment) from patients a lot. We think about just the general services that people need to have close to home. We can provide all that–and we do it well.”

The investment in Holy Cross Hospital occurs amid the backdrop of University of Utah Health recently breaking ground for a major medical complex on West Valley City’s west side that will be similar in scope to its flagship University Hospital. “Everyone’s been a little concerned about that and certainly our own team members, just wondering what that would do” to Holy Cross Hospital,” McSweeney said. However, “Because of the growth in the west valley communities, even with the University (Hospital) campus already underway, the proposed bed size there and our bed capacity still most likely won’t meet the need for the growth,” she surmised. “Both organizations will thrive out here.” 

McSweeney said the opening of the first phase of the University of Utah hospital at 3784 S. 5600 West scheduled for 2028 will not necessarily hinder the course being charted for her facility but rather provide an opportunity for collaboration with the university system’s research and teaching resources.

McSweeny said that Common Spirit Health published a letter of intent last year to establish a clinical partnership with University of Utah Health. Negotiations to formalize that relationship are still underway. 

Holy Cross Hospital West Valley is one of five hospitals in Davis, Salt Lake, and Utah counties that were acquired by Chicago-based Common Spirit Health from Steward Health Care in 2023. The other four are Holy Cross Hospital-Salt Lake (formerly Salt Lake Regional Medical Center), Holy Cross Hospital-Jordan Valley (previously Jordan Valley Medical Center in West Jordan), Holy Cross Hospital-Davis (formerly Davis Hospital and Medical Center in Layton), and Holy Cross Hospital-Mountain Point (what used to be Mountain Point Medical Center in Lehi). 

Besides the recent improvements, Holy Cross Hospital-West Valley last year earned the designation as one of the safest hospitals for patients in the nation by the Leapfrog Group. The independent national nonprofit watchdog awarded an “A” grade to the medical center based on ratings focused on “preventable medical errors, infections, and injuries that kill more than 500 patients a day in the United States,” according to Leapfrog and Common Spirit Health.