St. Tammany Health System history

The St Tammany Hospital Guild has been providing comfort and companionship to the patients at the Covington hospital, and assistance to the medical staff, since March 25, 1955, which is when the group was formed in a meeting at the Southern Hotel. (Image via STHS archive)

In its first year of operation, the hospital hosted an average of 16.3 inpatients per day. It wasn’t even three years old, in fact, when St Tammany Parish voters in July 1957 approved another bond issue to pay for a 15-room expansion and assorted renovations.

By 1968, it expanded again, this time by 61 beds.

As the hospital has grown over the years, the guild has kept pace, raising money to purchase needed equipment for the hospital and – since 1972 – awarding scholarships to hospital employees who are continuing their medical education.

The main entrance to St Tammany Parish Hospital is shown in a circa 1985 photo.

In October 1995, the group took things to the next level with the opening of the St Tammany Hospital Gift Shoppe, the result of some 20 years’ worth of fundraising and planning.

While the daily tasks have changed, that generous spirit still fuels today’s guild members, said longtime STHS volunteer Dottie Frederick, who joined the guild in 2000 following the death of her husband.

In 2003, St Tammany Health System leadership asked local physician Doctor Adrian B. Cairns to steer the formation of the St Tammany Hospital Foundation.

Completed in 2004, the $45 million project would triple the size of the hospital and add the sun-drenched atrium lobby that visitors know today.

A construction crane lifts a section of truss for a pedestrian skybridge into place over South Tyler Street in summer 2011, linking St Tammany Parish Hospital with the Charles A. Frederick Jr.

Current foundation Executive Director Nicole Suhre points, for example, to the foundation’s first capital campaign in 2012, which set an ambitious goal of raising $3 million to help fund the hospital’s Pediatric Emergency Department.

In 2014, the health system entered into a strategic partnership with Ochsner Health, further expanding its reach and creating the most comprehensive, integrated health system in St Tammany Parish history.

In 2016, the hospital renovated and greatly expanded its Emergency Department, which to this day includes the region’s only Pediatric Emergency Department.

It would become a passion for Cairns, who would end up serving as the chairman of the foundation’s first Board of Trustees and remain a key part of foundation leadership until his death in 2017.

In 2019, the guild’s annual donation to the foundation was more than $65,000 and funded everything from an opioid intervention program to iPads for the hospital’s pediatric unit to rocking chairs for its New Family Center.

For her part, Coffman said she also sees an opportunity to expand the use of video visits and other in-home healthcare options that began growing exponentially in popularity among local residents with the onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.