Grande Ronde Hospital Foundation closes campaign after raising $8.5 million

Grande Ronde Hospital Foundation has closed its Healthier Together Capital Campaign after raising more than $8.5 million for health care projects that will reshape services in La Grande and across Northeast Oregon. The money is already tied to new operating and procedure rooms, a major imaging expansion, and equipment upgrades meant to make care more local, faster and easier to access.

The four-year campaign moved through a leadership phase in 2022 and 2023 before opening to the public in 2023, and it finished with broad community backing rather than a handful of large gifts. The foundation said the effort drew more than 11,700 individual gifts and pledges, and 10,990 of them were for $100 or less. That level of small-dollar support showed how deeply the campaign reached into Union County households, volunteers and supporters who kept it moving to the end.

The largest share of the campaign is going toward a 96,000-square-foot Surgical Services expansion. The project includes new operating and procedure rooms that should give local patients more capacity for care without having to leave the county for routine surgeries and specialty procedures. Campaign dollars are also supporting a $3.5 million expansion and realignment of the Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging Department, a change aimed at improving how patients move through diagnostics and treatment.

For families in Union County, the changes matter most in the places where delays and travel are felt most sharply. The Family Birthing Center already received updated furniture and equipment, an investment that reinforces maternity care at a time when rural hospitals are expected to do more with less. The foundation also said partial funding is going toward a da Vinci 5 surgical system, which is expected to arrive in late summer or fall of 2026 and could expand access to advanced minimally invasive surgery in La Grande.

The campaign’s next priority is expansion of the Regional Medical Center on Fourth Street in La Grande, with plans to add clinical space and workforce-training capacity. In a region where hospitals compete constantly for staff and patients often travel out of county for care, that next phase points to a larger goal: keeping more services in Union County and building a stronger local health system for the long term.