Press Date: 11/17/2005
Mock rooms enable caregivers and public to walk through patient areas.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — OhioHealth is hosting two events to showcase three mock patient rooms for Dublin Methodist Hospital. The “finished” mock rooms have been built in a warehouse space much like a movie set near the hospital construction site at Route 33 and Avery-Muirfield Road. Media is invited to any of the sessions scheduled for:
• Monday, Nov. 21, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — OhioHealth employees will tour the rooms with an eye to making suggestions and contributing to the design. NOTE: Updated interior and exterior renderings of the facility will be on display.
• Tuesday, Nov. 29, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., 5 to 7:30 p.m. — A community open house will be held for anyone interested in seeing what their new hospital is going to look and feel like.
The three rooms represent a typical inpatient room, a labor and delivery room, and an emergency department exam room. Every detail of the rooms was thought through from both a patient and caregiver perspective.
“These rooms are one-of-a-kind in central Ohio and represent the leading edge of hospital design within the healthcare industry,” said Cheryl Herbert, RN, president, DublinMethodist Hospital. “They are uniquely designed to maximize the comfort of patients and families, while providing enhanced patient safety features.” Some of the unique features of the rooms include:
• Like Handed/Identical—all typical patient rooms are laid out in a standardized fashion to enhance caregivers’ ability to locate medical equipment and supplies, particularly in an emergency.
• Size —at 340 square feet, the typical patient room is large enough to comfortably accommodate patients, families, and staff.
• Acuity adaptable — typical rooms are capable of caring for patients with varying degrees of illness, virtually eliminating the need to transfer patients as they progress toward discharge.
As a Pebble Project partner, Dublin Methodist Hospital construction is being watched closely in the healthcare, design and construction industries. The Pebble Project is a joint research effort between The Center for Health Design and selected healthcare providers to provide researched and documented examples of how design impacts quality of care.
“Evidence-based design has guided us through this process,” said Herbert. “It relies on data to make decisions about the environment and layout of a building. The goal is to improve outcomes related to patient satisfaction and staff turnover and retention. By incorporating evidence-based design, we expect to see less than average staff turnover, increases in patient satisfaction, reduced patient falls, fewer infections and decreases in patient transfers.”
The rooms are the result of input from many OhioHealth physicians and staff who were given the opportunity to view the rooms and provide input about what worked and what didn’t from their own experiences providing patient care.
Among the changes made as a result of this input was the layout of the almost 400 squarefeet of each labor and delivery room, the placement of medical equipment to improve accessibility, cosmetic changes and revised layout of the patient headwalls.
The $130 million Dublin Methodist Hospital will initially have 94 beds but could eventually expand to as many as 300. It will include an emergency department, inpatient and outpatient surgery services, labor and delivery, general medical/surgical services and intensive care rooms in a unique patient and family-centered atmosphere. The 300,000-square-foot, full-service hospital is scheduled to open in late 2007.
OhioHealth is also expanding and upgrading services at Riverside Methodist Hospital, Grant Medical Center, including a new $59 million Surgical and Heart Hospital as part of a major revitalization project, and Doctors Hospital on Columbus’ west side with the addition of a 26-bed cardiac step-down telemetry unit scheduled to open in January.
