North Patient Tower

What does $85 million look like? A new, five-story glistening glass tower overlooking Hal Greer Boulevard on the campus of CabellHuntington Hospital. The much-anticipated opening of the hospital’s North Patient Tower has finally arrived, as the hospital opens its doors to the community in a grand opening celebration Friday from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Cancer survivor and former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow will be the featured guest for the program, which will also include light refreshments and tours of the newest addition to the Cabell-Huntington Hospital complex. The 174,000 square foot building will increase the percentage of private rooms at the hospital from 47 percent to approximately 90 percent, and the number of staffed beds from 268 to 303 beds. Each floor has been designed to afford patients the most spacious, comfortable and practical rooms possible while enhancing the delivery of care through more team nursing stations and state-of-the-art computerized charting. “Our focus is always on our patients and how we can serve them better. In many cases, a hospital stay is a trying time for patients and their families. Now we hope to make them more comfortable by offering them brad new, state-of-the-art rooms and waiting areas with all of the amenities they need,” Brent A. Marsteller, Cabell Huntington Hospital president and CEO said. “Our mission is to serve our patient and our community, and to do that, we must be able to offer them the latest technology and a great variety of services in a facility that will exceed their expectations. “When you add the compassion, experience and expertise of our physicians and employees, we can now offer the members of this community the quality of health care that they deserve.” Dr. Kevin Yingling, president of the medical and dental staffs at the hospital and chairman of the internal medicine department at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, said the creation of the North Patient Tower will bring into sharper focus the highly intense areas of medical care the hospital provides. “In these high acuity areas of care, a state-of-the-art facility can make a difference in the overall outcome of the patient,” Yingling offered. “The majority of the areas in this new building are highly intense areas of care – including adult, neonatal, surgical and cardiac intensive care units. “What the North Patient Tower means to this community is an improved coordination of these services,” he said. “I think that the physical relation between a patient coming in critically ill to the emergency department and being able to quickly be moved to a critical care environment where they’ll receive the breadth of their care is very important to a positive outcome. Those coordinations and logistical troubles that many hospitals have are solved in this building.” For example, on the first floor, the hospital has placed an expanded 44-bed Emergency/Level II Trauma Department, which includes four trauma rooms, 30 exam rooms and 10 ImmediateCare rooms, Cabell Huntington Hospital’s service for non-emergency walk-in patients. The unit retains its close proximity to radiology and cardiology services. Additionally, the location of the critical care units, adult intensive care units and pediatric and neo-natal intensive care units places all of the necessary departments within a short elevator ride directly from the emergency department. “There’s an efficiency about the new building that wasn’t possible in the old building,” Yingling said. Located on the second floor of the North Patient Tower is the post-surgical nursing department, a 38-bed unit featuring all private rooms and enhanced bathroom facilities. “You’re talking about a move from a small, shared room to private rooms with a large area for family members with a pull-out couch. It’s the wave of the future,” said Dr. David Denning, chairman of Marshall’s department of surgery. The second floor, like the other floors in the new tower, feature an earth tone color scheme, modern bathroom fixtures and luxury items not previously found in a hospital setting, such as carpeted hallways, plush waiting rooms, large conference rooms and computer terminals for every two patients’ rooms. There are also rooms designated for bariatric patients. “I think all of these things are going to help the staff and the patients feel more a part of their care than ever before,” Denning explained. Dr. Yingling concurred.“I believe the outcome for patients can be dictated by the environment they receive care in – the more positive, encouraging and family-related you can make it, the better outcome you’re going to receive. “Just the fact that these rooms each have windows for natural light and areas for families to be able to spend more time with the patient is an incredible advancement over a 50-year-old facility,” he stated. The third floor houses one of the busiest components of Cabell-Huntington Hospital – the Labor, Delivery and Recovery area. With 2,600 deliveries each year, the time was right for a shift from a more hospital-like setting to a hotel-like experience, complete with flat screen televisions. “It truly is a hotel-like setting. You just can’t believe how beautiful and how spacious the rooms are until you see it,” said Women and Children’s Services director Amy Smith. “The care and the thought that went into planning this to accommodate babies and their families is truly remarkable.” LDR will feature 18 private rooms, eight high-risk monitoring rooms, three C-Section delivery rooms, six recovery rooms and six triage rooms. The third floor, like other departments in the hospital, features multiple team nursing stations to keep nurses closer to the patients. Two floors up and connected by a designated elevator that runs only between the third floor LDR and the fifth floor, is the NICU. It will be the single biggest change in philosophy of care when the North Patient Tower opens. “The current NICU is more of a ward-type setting with 29 beds in one big room,” Smith said. “What we are moving to are all private or semi-private rooms, which can be used for twins and other multiples.” The real advantage to the new NICU space is the move away from noisy communal space to a better bonding opportunity for the parents and baby. Outside the NICU rooms, parents will have access to the amenities of home, including a washer, dryer and kitchenette, as well as a television and computer terminal. Rounding out the fifth floor is an 18-bed oncology unit. Since the birth of the Edwards Comprehensive Cancer Center, the need for oncology services has risen in the community. Nurse Manager of the unit Molly Sarver has said the change in atmosphere of the unit can’t help but lift the spirits of patients who may be hospitalized for long periods. “The coordination of care for our very sick patients and being able to move them right into the designated unit of care is very important with regards to outcome,” Yingling offered. The new unit also includes four specially built rooms complete with HEPA filters and positive pressure for immune-compromised patients. “In regards to infection control measures, we’ve moved from an environment where the patient, out of convenience, might ask for a private room, to an environment where we’re talking about private rooms in terms of improved outcome in healthcare,” Yingling said. “The charge to every hospital in this country is to move to individual patient rooms. It’s beyond a convenience matter – it’s an advantage in health outcome.” The North Patient Tower’s fourth floor houses a variety of critical care units, including adult intensive care, cardiac intensive care and surgical intensive care. “We’re gaining a substantial increase in the number of beds, with much larger, private rooms with significantly better lighting and better modernization of equipment,” Denning said. “Some of the rooms offer reverse air flow as well, for patients who need that isolation.” Denning said the hospital’s big crunch is the intensive care units, which are loaded with pneumonia patients in the cooler months and car and ATV wreck patients in the warmer months. “All hospitals are going to have to expand their ICU beds, so this is going to be extremely helpful for us,” he explained. The CICU and SICU are nearly doubling in bed number and the ICU rooms are doubling in size, giving caregivers easier access to patients and the space to accommodate the monitors and other equipment patients require to get well. As with other floors in the tower, the intensive care units rely on decentralized nursing stations to put caregivers bedside rather than down the hall. The move for all departments has been likened to giving Huntington’s medical community the tools to work harder and more efficiently for the health of the community. Denning said everyone he has talked to – from staff to potential patients – are excited about the move, which has been a long time coming for Cabell Huntington Hospital. “The bottom line is that, in health care, we can never rest,” CHH president Marsteller said.