by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | March 06, 2020
Currently, we have one OR setting, so our elective cases are done in one location — the same location our Trauma Center utilizes. Our team does a phenomenal job, but it’s a challenge to deliver elective care and emergent care at the same location.
In the new facility, trauma will stay primarily in the current patient tower, so we can deliver trauma and emergent care all in that setting. And then we will have an entire separate new OR floor for scheduled and elective surgery, which will allow us to deliver more timely and efficient surgical care.
In the last couple of years, we built a new cardiac cath lab. The new patient tower will hold the prep and recovery to that unit. We will have an entire Cardiovascular Institute floor in the new patient tower. All the rooms in the new patient tower are set up to be acuity flexible. On the Cardiovascular Institute floor, we’re actually going to do some research on keeping the patient in the room and bringing the different levels of care to the patient. So if they come in as an ICU patient, they will have intensivists and ICU nurses seeing them, but as they get better and step down their medical status, they will stay in the room and we will bring their providers to them. There are thoughts that this will decrease the length of stay and improve communication among stakeholders to improve patient satisfaction. We’re collecting data now about this population and we will deliver care in the new method and see if we impact those areas. If we don’t, that won’t be the healthcare delivery future for us. But if we do, we’ll have found something positive, and being an academic healthcare facility with an important piece of our mission to look for innovative solutions, we’ll be fulfilling that role.
Patient Waiting Room, Renderings provided by Perkins and Will
HCB News: With your background as a pediatric nurse, when it came time to design the new tower, were there things you were able to suggest that would make it easier for the staff having daily interaction with patients?
KG: It’s something I’ve been incredibly passionate about for a long time. Part of that rationale and reason are basically because of what your question touched on. Obviously the architects and all the other team members had input and their fingerprints on the project, but I’d like to think I had impact from being a pediatric nurse, being a face in front of patients and family. You’ll see all our rooms are over 300 square feet and they’re divided into a healthcare team, patient area and family area. In our current space, we get a lot of feedback from family members that when the academic healthcare team comes into the room, families don’t feel like they have anywhere to be. They feel like they aren’t supposed to be there because we crowd them out. So the goal was to create a space that would be very friendly and supportive of their presence regardless of the resources coming into the room. On top of that, you’ll see from the exterior that all the patient rooms are on the outside-facing walls with windows going floor to ceiling to provide plenty of natural light and a healing environment
