In the last 37 years, what has changed about you? Have you updated what
kind of vehicle you drive? Did you do any construction to your home to
make it better suited to your family's needs? Have you updated what
clothing you wear or how you style your hair?
Campbell County Memorial Hospital was built in 1980 as a state of the art healthcare facility. However,
in the last 37 years, the footprint of the inpatient
Intensive Care Unit (ICU),
Maternal Child and
Medical/Surgical Units have stayed the same. The proposed remodel of our patient care rooms would
address this issue.
The current patient care rooms were not built with the needs of today’s
care practices in mind. Here are a few of the identified problems:
- Rooms are too small for equipment and family members to visit or stay
- Many of today’s patients are larger and more difficult to move
- Bathrooms are too small to maneuver and don’t have a sink inside
the bathroom
- Maternal child rooms don’t function well for how moms and babies
receive care
- Staff must walk long distances to and from nursing stations and to stock supplies
- Nurses are getting older as a population group and in our workforce (nursing shortage)
With the help of experts from
HGA Architects and Engineers, the project has been in the works for over 1.5 years. Why is it taking
so long? Before drawing any floorplans or finalizing the design, we asked
the people who do the actual work of patient care; nurses, nursing aides,
environmental services and dietary staff to create their ideal vision
of what a patient room should be.
Members of the Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC) looked at the
project from the patient and family’s point of view, and the team
visited other hospitals in the state and across the country to see the
best practices in patient room design.
The group used a process called Lean to analyze the current rooms and the
workflow. In the simplest terms, Lean thinking looks at how waste can
be eliminated to create value. Waste can be defined in many ways, such
as the time it takes a nurse to respond to a patient’s call light,
or the distance a family must travel to find a space to gather near the
patient’s room.
Facilitated by CCH Process Improvement Coordinator Bud Lawrence, data was
collected on every aspect of a patient’s experience in their hospital
room, down to how many steps a nurse walks each shift to care for their
patients. All the data, ideas from the team, ideas from other facilities
and the expertise of the architects were brought together to create a
larger, more comfortable and efficient room design for medical surgical,
ICU and OB patients. The space above the hospital lobby and the current
Maternal Child unit will be turned into 39 patient rooms—basically
two new patient rooms for every three existing rooms, along with new waiting
rooms and gathering spaces for patients and families.
The results from all of this work have helped CCH create a new inpatient
room plan:
- Current available beds resized to 39 larger rooms—there will be eight
LDRP (Labor/Delivery/Recovery/Postpartum) rooms, four flex rooms, three
ante/postpartum rooms, three OB triage rooms, five level 2 nursery rooms,
C-section room; 31 Med/Surg rooms (includes four flex rooms); and eight
ICU rooms.
- Family zones in the rooms with comfortable furniture
- Inpatient rehab in Med/Surg unit
- Pass through “Nurse Servers” for supplies
- Designated waiting areas and spaces where doctors can meet with families
to discuss care
- Sight line from the bed to the bathroom to reduce falls
- Decentralized nursing station—nurses do their work close to the patient
- Accessible outdoor courtyard for patient and staff respite
- Patient lifts in some rooms
- Roman showers
- Nightlights to illuminate the path to the bathroom
Pending approval of the FY 2018 budget, construction is slated to begin
spring 2018 and take 20 months to complete, at a cost of $28 million.
However, in the next month, two mock patient rooms will be constructed
in their final location on the second floor above the Main Lobby sometime
this fall. This will enable testing of all the features of these rooms,
from the new style roman showers to the size and location of built-in
cabinets. The mock rooms will also be tested for the functionality of
the new LDRP (Labor/Delivery/Recovery/Postpartum) care process, and during
simulated code responses.
Current projections show the project can be funded with existing cash and
revenue. The project is included in the FY 18 proposed budget, which will
go to the
Board for approval on July 20, 2017. No final decisions have been made on funding
the project.
CCH Administration is confident that the new patient rooms will create
a functionally effective work space and flow, and will serve us well for
the next 40 to 50 years. For more information, please visit
www.cchwyo.org/ptrooms.