Dozens of pairs of scissors sliced down on a red ribbon stretched across one end of the brand-new Kuik (“river” in Yugtun) Café on Jan. 16. The 109-room Qavartarvik (“a place to sleep”) Customer Lodge was officially open for business.
The three-story, 80,000-square-foot, hotel-like building will serve the thousands of people who visit medical facilities in Bethel every year.
Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation (YKHC) President and CEO Dan Winkelman said that he couldn’t be more pleased with the Qavartarvik Customer Lodge. “It's a wonderful, safe, comfortable, and convenient facility, co-located next to the hospital,” he said.
Winkelman said that for the first time in his 10 years at the helm, the corporation will have enough spaces for patients to stay.
“We have 110 people that use our outpatient clinics every single day,” Winkelman said. “A lot of those are Bethel-based, a lot of them are the villages around here. But there's a lot more from the rest of the [more than] 50 villages.”
After completing a hospital renovation and addition in 2019, Winkelman said that the obvious next priority was patient lodging.
The old, 26-unit patient hostel was built in the late 1990s. It has mostly shared restrooms. Hospital officials say that it’s always full, and that overflow rooms in local hotels are also filled daily. Officials say that they’re frequently fielding complaints about hotel cleanliness and availability, especially during storms or foggy weather when regional airlines can’t fly.
The new lodge more than quadruples the hospital’s capacity to host out-of-town patients.
“That's the best part of all this for me is treating our Elders and our customers with the respect that they deserve,” Winkelman said. “I can't be prouder than that.”
Gloria George was one of the facility’s first guests, the night before the ribbon-cutting. She’s a board member from Mountain Village.
“I'm looking forward to our community members coming for their appointments,” George said at the event. “This building is very state-of-the-art, and their travel needs can be met. And just want to encourage everyone to take care of the buildings so we will last long and respect the new surroundings. And thank you, YKHC, for all the hard work and dedication you've given for our community.”
Sam Tinker Sr. is a board member from Kasigluk, and stayed the night at the lodge before the ribbon-cutting ceremony. He was impressed.
“You get the feeling that you're in Anchorage when you first come in here,” Tinker Sr. said. “The rooms, they're great. And the food is great too.”
The Kuik Café, located in the lobby and named with the Yugtun word for “river,” will serve traditional foods. The menu for the facility’s ribbon-cutting on Jan. 16 included reindeer salami sandwiches, root vegetable and seafood hash, smoked salmon, fry bread, and akutaq.
The cafeteria seats 200, with two outdoor dining areas for warmer months. There’s a small robot wearing a printed tuxedo that travels between the tables to pick up dishes. It’s named Piskar, the Yugtun word for “helper.”
The $80 million facility is a short walk from the main hospital, but will also have shuttle services between the hospital, lodge, and airport.
Its three floors are color-coordinated, themed after the water, land, and sky of the region. Deanna Latham is Vice President of Support Services for the corporation. She said that the color themes mirror the hospital and will help with navigation.
“You'll see blues on the first floor, greens on the second floor, and sky colors, so reds like the sunset or Northern Lights [on the third floor],” Latham said.
Like the nearby hospital, Latham said that the lodge will be intentional about incorporating art into the patient experience. They’re looking for art to fill the lodge’s empty display cases now. And huge photographs of landscapes from throughout the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta fill the hallways and walls in the rooms.
“A lot of them came actually from our dental director [Tucker Burnett] who has a hidden talent, who loves photography, loves to travel around the region, and he just had a fantastic collection,” Latham said.
The lodge pays homage to Bethel’s 1954 hospital, the last two buildings of which were demolished in 2023 for safety reasons. In the new lodge’s entryway lounge, shiplap woodwork uses wood salvaged from the old hospital buildings.
“I did not want it to just be a facility for the region, I want people to feel comfortable,” Winkelman said. “And so it was really important to me to make sure that we pay attention to the three different cultures that we serve in our region: Yup’ik, Cup’ik, and Athabascan peoples.”
Signage in the building is written in Yugtun and English.
“I always have my Grandma Lena in my mind,” Winkelman said. “And my Grandma Lena [spoke] English as a second language. And I always think: ‘How would she get around in this facility, or in our new hospital, or in a clinic?’ Or, you know, ‘How would she navigate whatever improvement we're trying to do?’ It’s always good for me to think like that because we want to make everything as accessible as possible for our Elders, for young mothers with lots of kids. That's all stressful, that's all difficult, especially if you don't speak English very well. And we always want to focus on their comfort and their needs. And so that's something that I always have in the back of my mind.”
In the lodge’s lobby, there’s a laundry room and a small convenience store for items like toothpaste or snacks. There’s also a satellite travel office to help with booking flights or extending a stay at the lodge.
“We do over 9,000 reservations a month,” Winkelman said. “We’re the largest rural tribal health organization in the state, and we do the most Medicaid reservations out of any of them.”
Out of the approximately 30,000 people in the Y-K Delta region, Winkelman said, around two-thirds have Medicaid.
The new customer lodge is a step forward, but won’t be able to solve every problem faced by a person from a remote village trying to access medical care in the Bethel hub.
“The one problem we're going to have is there's not enough aircraft,” Winkelman said. “There's not enough seats in and out. When Ravn went bankrupt, we lost 100 flights in the region every single day.”
Guests will use cards to access their rooms and elevators. Most of the rooms in the new lodge are doubles, with two queen beds.
On the third floor, Winkelman pushed open a door to a room with a small kitchen and living room.
“Here's one of our suites,” Winkelman said. “This is built for larger families with an extended stay. So someone staying here at the facility for a long time.”
He said that there are seven of those suites in the building.
“Half of the region is 18 or younger, almost 45% or thereabouts,” Winkelman said. “And so we have a lot of families that are young and large. And so this is geared for them if they have extended stay here.”
With an eye to the unique constraints of rural life, Latham said that each room has a full-size fridge and freezer.
“Especially as we have folks traveling in, a lot of times they come in and they shop,” Latham said. “So we wanted to make sure that they had ample space to store their frozen foods if they had to overnight.”
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Latham said that the design team paid attention to contagion issues. Fabric surfaces are made of medical-grade vinyl. The facility even has machines that can heat rooms up to 130 degrees to disinfect and kill potential pests.
“During the design and selection of the finishes, we were very intentional about infection control,” Latham said. “So we wanted to make sure that all of the finishes were health care-grade, wipeable, cleanable – they're all bleach-cleanable. Some of these finishes, you could even hit him with a bat and they won't break.”
A few of the rooms in the building are also equipped with special ventilation, another feature inspired by the pandemic.
Winkelman raised his voice to speak over the loud HVAC system in a room on the lower level: “What you're hearing is a fan,” he said. “We have four rooms on the first floor, and this is one of our negative air pressure rooms. So if we had an overflow issue in our hospital and someone was contagious with something, they would be in here, so [the negative air pressure is] to keep everyone else safe in the facility. That's unlikely to happen, but after COVID we wanted to make sure that we kept that in mind for overflow reasons.”
Winkelman said a stay at the lodge works out to around $200 per night, but customers won’t see that cost. Lodge stays will be billed to insurance or absorbed by the health corporation.
The facility’s design and construction was a collaboration between YKHC, Fairbanks-based Design Alaska, contractor AKSW Davis, and cultural designer John Paul Jones with Jones & Jones, who was the record architect for the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. The facility contracts with NMS for building security, food service, and janitorial services.
Latham said that coming to Bethel for health care can be a stressful experience. “And I think this is going to be able to help alleviate some of that,” she said. “I think we're going be able to offer better care.”
“For example,” Latham said, “It was very difficult for us to be able to provide colonoscopies because in the old hostel, folks had to share a restroom. And so now we're going to be able to have people with private bathrooms, be able to have their pre-op care just here in town, in our facility. And we'll just be able to take care of people so much better now that we have this facility online.”
Winkelman said that he thinks it may take up to a year for patients to fully realize that there’s a new, better place for them to stay and embrace the Qavartarvik Customer Lodge.
“We have bets on when the first time [the new facility is] going to be full,” Winkelman said with a laugh. “That kind of depends on the weather. My guess is we get two or three days of fog, it might get full, we'll see. But for the very first time, I will hopefully not have to come over to the hospital and apologize to an Elder that had to spend the night on a cot in the hospital on the floor. I'm really looking forward to that.”
And, looking out a third-floor window and gesturing to an empty lot below, Winkelman said that there’s even room for the lodge to expand, with potential for another 20 units on the south side of the building.
