Riverside’s new Pavilion caters to patients and providers
Written by Kim O’Brien Root
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[dropcap]There’s an iPod dock in the operating rooms.[/dropcap]A surgeon can pick out his favorite tunes—a little R.E.M., maybe some Beatles, heck, the whole playlist—and with a tap of the new computer screen, the tunes immediately start playing throughout the room.
But the iPod dock is just a tiny piece of what the 250,000-square foot addition to Riverside Regional Medical Center includes. The new $107 million surgical pavilion, which opened in January, features the latest in design and technology for the Newport News hospital.
The little things are just the bonus.
“You’re now walking into what the future is,” says Glenn Gangitano, the hospital’s project manager and a former surgical technician. “There are bells and whistles, but they’re efficient bells and whistles.”
Riverside calls the Pavilion’s opening “an important milestone in the transformation from a community hospital to a true regional medical center.” The first hospital opened in Newport News in 1916—today Riverside Health System runs four major hospitals throughout eastern Virginia, including a fifth being built in Williamsburg, along with three specialty hospitals, three retirement communities and a network of care centers and physician practices.
The Pavilion, a spacious three-story building adjacent to the existing hospital on J. Clyde Morris Boulevard, includes new operating room suites, an endoscopy suite, 72 private patient rooms in four wings, central sterile processing and a full-basement with a pharmacy. Each wing has its own specialty—general surgery, surgical intensive care, orthopedics and neurosurgery.
It took two and a half years to construct the Pavilion, starting with an energy plant upgrade. In the event of a major power outage, in the event of something like a hurricane, the hospital can seamlessly switch to back-up power—which is incredibly important for a Level 2 trauma center, says neurologist Dr. Patrick Parcells, the medical center’s senior vice president and administrator.
There is state-of-the-art technology throughout the Pavilion, from a pneumatic tube system to send paperwork and specimens between floors to the newest generation of hospital beds. Every inch of the addition was built with materials designed to minimize infection, such as all-tile bathrooms with seamless sinks and no grout to catch germs, doors with special coating and sealed rubber flooring in the operating rooms, Parcells says.
“We’re incredibly proud of this,” Parcells continues. “This is one of the meccas of emergency care.”
The beds in the 18-bed surgical ICU include smart features such as alerts to ensure the proper degree of the bed, plus vibration and percussion settings to help break up lung secretions. They can also be lowered to the floor or tilted to get a patient to a standing position.
“This bed should do everything but drive itself down J. Clyde Morris,” jokes Susan Donston, the nurse manager for the surgical ICU.
In all seriousness, planners put every consideration into play when designing the Pavilion, taking into account the wishes of hospital staff, Parcells says. Even once the plans were drawn up—much done using 3-D computer simulation—construction company W. M. Jordan built mock-ups of rooms in a vacant building and had hospital staff walk through and offer suggestions.
Small, but significant tweaks were made at every angle, from the placement of hinges on the patient-room armoires to the number of shelves in the rooms so family members wouldn’t have to place personal items on the floors.
There are many levels of comfort built in, including wide hallways with contrasting stripes on the floor (to help visually impaired patients); warm, earth-toned colors on the walls; and three different kinds of chairs and recliners in the rooms to accommodate both patients and visitors. Patient rooms—built larger than code requires—have seven different levels of lighting for all comfort levels.
And there’s the pink noise.
Different than white noise, which is made when the sound of different frequencies is combined, the sound from pink noise has the same power or frequency, such as raindrops hitting the ground or wind rustling in the trees. As background noise, pink noise—named because light with a similar power spectrum would appear pink—is said to be more calming.
The soothing hush plays throughout the Pavilion, in the wood-paneled patient rooms, in the hallways, in the lobbies. The pink noise makes for a quieter setting, even amid the busy noises, beeps and chimes of a hospital, and overall more peaceful surroundings, Parcells says.
“When you have a lot of noise and stimulation, it affects everyone,” says Celia Grinstead, nurse manager of the general surgery unit. “Everything is designed for peace, healing and comfort.”
The various electronics throughout the Pavilion are top-notch: Rather than the old-school grease boards that would hang near the nurse’s station handwritten with the location of each patient, everything is displayed on huge flat-screen monitors. Outside the patient rooms are small, computerized display screens that note the names of the patient, the physician and the nurse on duty, and a helpful reminder to always wash hands or use hand sanitizer.
There are computers in the hallways but also in the rooms, phones for the nurses to carry wherever they go and a staff locator system—affectionately called the “nurse tracker”—that’s connected to a card attached to the name badge and allows any staff member with one to be located.
The technological advances in the Pavilion can be found everywhere, assisted by about 530,000 feet of wires and cables that hide between floors. The third floor is set aside for mechanical operations.
Technology is in the lobby, where patients who check in are handed pagers, similar to what a restaurant uses—only these feature a tiny digital screen that tells the patient exactly where to go when called.
Technology is in the 12 operating rooms, which are more than double the size of the old rooms and feature LED lights that are cool to the touch, satellite-controlled clocks and a cutting-edge video integration system that can quickly display X-rays, medical records and live video on multiple screens.
Even the floor is different—thick rubber that’s more comfortable for hours of standing and heat-welded for easy clean-up. The old operating rooms were built in the 1950s, project manager Gangitano says, so for the surgeons, entering
the new rooms was “like Christmas morning.”
Riverside planned the transition to the Pavilion for a year, right down to hours of training on the new phone system. About 50 patients, including 10 who were considered critical care, were moved on a Sunday, and at 1:26 p.m. on Jan. 28, the call was made to switch ORs. By that evening, doctors were performing the Pavilion’s first emergency surgery.
Two days later, every bed was full, Parcells says. Fortunately, there is still room to grow—the Pavilion was built that way, with operating rooms that can accommodate more equipment and structures already in place on the top floor that allow for expansion upward.
Yet along with all the latest in technology, new equipment and bells and whistles, for Parcells and other Riverside staffers, it still comes down to providing the best in quality care. Parcells is still going to pause in the elevator to chat with visiting family members and thank them for trusting Riverside.
He’s still going to rave about the piano on the second floor that volunteers from Christopher Newport University’s fine arts department come two days a week to play—“music therapy,” Parcells calls it.
The fancy stuff makes it all a bit easier.
