Designing Our New Facilities to Better Meet the Needs of our Patients and the Care Team

This week I want to provide you with another update on The Promise Project. I am glad to report that we are on schedule with the construction of the three-story inpatient addition, parking garage, and the Sandra R. Berman Pavilion. We have completed the demolition phase of the project and have welcomed the tower crane that is doing all the heavy lifting of materials to build the addition.

When GBMC opened in 1965, private patient rooms were a novelty. Since then, these same patient rooms have become too small to meet the needs of patients, their families, and the care team. The three-level addition will add 60 new patient rooms that are designed for collaboration while providing a quiet space for medical patients to rest and heal. Patient rooms will include ample space for medical equipment and advanced technology, room for medical teams to gather and deliver care, and space for loved ones to visit comfortably. They will have advanced sound proofing to facilitate the rest and healing process. 

The rooms won’t just be larger; they are also designed with the lessons we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, incorporating more isolation capacity for patients with infectious diseases. 

Joining me this week is Rhonda Wyskiel, our Senior Director of Performance Improvement and Innovation, as we discuss the new clinical workspace and how it will make it easier for clinicians to get their job done. 

The new inpatient facility will have a computer in every room. Can you give us an idea what that will mean to the patients and clinicians? 
We are laser focused on providing an exceptional patient experience at GBMC, and that means we design our process/workflows/ and technology to be patient centered. The Institute of Medicine defines patient-centered care as “care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values.”

Consider this scenario: Clinicians walk into the room and initiate a discussion, working through the history of present illness, past histories, medications, and allergies, doing all of this while trying to commit to memory every detail. Next, they exit the room and scurry to the nearest computer, sit down and re-enter the patient’s information into the chart. Invariably uncovering something that wasn’t discussed. “Oh, it says the patient is on aspirin; I forgot to ask if he is still taking that,” or, “the ER note says she fell and hit her head two days ago; she didn’t mention that to me.” Having a computer at the bedside enables us to verify or dive deeper into these issues. This improves patient safety and patient satisfaction, preventing an unnecessary return to the patient’s room, asking later, or not addressing the issue at all.

All in all, this will provide an improved experience for everyone, allowing clinicians to look things up in the EHR at the point of care. Patients like it when you show them things. Placing orders in the patient rooms creates more efficiency and a better care experience. 

How will the nursing stations in the new inpatient facility differ from the ones currently in our hospital, and what are some of the advantages for both the clinician and the patient?
The nurse station is the fulcrum of activity on the inpatient hospital floor. At some point, virtually every hospital function intersects at this critical junction, often simultaneously, with various meetings occurring among a wide cross-section of hospital staff. It serves a diverse array of purposes, one being that it acts as a space for communication and interprofessional collaboration. Studies have shown that the design of the nurses’ station alone can impact aspects of patient and staff privacy, walking distance, and access to resources. In the Promise Project design, the nurses and other clinical and non-clinical staff will work together in a central location. Quick access to peers paves the way for learning, mentoring and efficient communication. Resources can be consolidated, and efficiency will be gained.  

In the design phase of the nurses’ station, we considered the context of providing patient care as a functional workspace. Clean, beautiful aesthetics contribute to the healing environment, but this space, maybe more than any other in the hospital environment, needs to be highly functional. This thoughtful design has the potential to reduce staff stress and fatigue, increase effectiveness in delivering care, improve patient safety, reduce patient and family stress and ultimately improve outcomes and overall healthcare delivery quality.

The new patient rooms will be replenished with supplies from the outside and “off-stage” areas. Can you explain how this will lead to a better patient and provider experience?
Stocking, re-stocking, and rotating supplies for patients is just one of the many tasks of nurses and other hospital staff, who need to provide quality patient care while managing hospital supplies and time efficiently. Pass-thru patient room nurse server cabinets are a secure and efficient solution for exchanging medical supplies, linens, drugs, liquids, bandage materials, and other items from outside the patient room. Now, more than ever, infection prevention is top of mind for all of us. Ensuring we create workflows to reduce the need for tasks to occur in a patient’s room that are able to be facilitated safely from outside the patient room is truly an innovation mindset. 

The cabinet can be accessed from the hospital unit corridor for quick re-stocking without needing to enter the patient’s room. From inside the room, the cabinets are stocked with patient supplies for staff to easily access them. The cabinet is customized with a wide variety of full extension bi-directional trays, shelves, linen hampers, and locking medication drawers. Storage can be accessed from either side for re-stocking. After a patient has been discharged, the trays can easily be swapped out of the cabinet and exchanged with fully stocked trays.

Cabinets will be equipped with keypad locks to secure stored materials and medications when not in use and to control access to medical supplies.

I am very proud to be at the forefront of innovation with our new patient rooms that will support the extraordinary work of our physicians, nurses, and other staff. This is an investment to move us closer to achieving our vision phrase – to every patient, every time, we will provide the care we would want for our own loved ones. I want to thank Rhonda for the work of her team and her leadership. I also want to thank all my colleagues for helping us get to this point in the construction process. For more information on our progress, please visit here.