When you think about how health care has changed over the past five decades, it’s almost mind boggling. The advancements in technology, the new discoveries – we’ve come a long way.
All that progress has required many hospitals to grow and change, but there sometimes comes a point where a health care facility has to be re-imagined. After all, many were first built decades ago.
That’s what’s happening in Milford. Bayhealth recently broke ground on an innovative health campus project that will include an inpatient hospital with state-of-the-art technology, patient-friendly access, and all private rooms designed around patients’ needs. So how are they doing it? With lots and lots of practice. We see how it all starts with a cardboard city.
“Out of cardboard, we have created and built, to the exact dimension, a patient room, and several other key rooms within the building that were going to replicate multiple times,” Mike Ashton, VP of Operations at Bayhealth, says.
In order to do that, Bayhealth rented an empty warehouse.
“And in doing so we can make sure that we have positioned the equipment in the room the right way, that door swings don’t interfere with access to the room, that line of sights are the best that can be achieved and we tested which way the bathroom should be situation in the patient room,” Mike says.
Another part of the project was bringing in medical professionals, and other front-line users to offer advice and influence how the real rooms will be designed. They even created a mock-up trauma bay elevator to be sure that not an inch of space, or a moment in time is wasted when lives hang in the balance.
“So, we brought the team in, they constructed a life-sized replica of what that trauma bay elevator would be, and we brought the physician, and nursing staff and the emergency care team out and we simulated basically a trauma event, and we were able to prove that trauma bay elevator would work in it’s size and scope and how it was being positioned,” Mike says.
In an industry that has grown and continues to grow at such a rapid pace, bayhealth wants this hospital to be positioned to grow even more in the future without interrupting services.
“In the end our job is to optimize the patient experience and to create quality and delivery of service that is nationally recognized and far reaching above what we have today,” Mike says.
