6 minute read
HOSPITAL BUILDING
MARC (RIGHT) AND WILL (LEFT) ROWLAND, ROWLAND ARCHITECTURE
Area health care facilities build up and out as they try to keep up with ever-evolving standards
Advertisement
BY HANNAH HERNER
s hospitals try to keep up with the
A ever-changing technology and the evolving needs of patients, area contractors and designers stay busy.
“If we designed o ce buildings, we wouldn’t say that o ce building technology has changed dramatically in the last 30, 40 years,” says Marc Rowland, president of Rowland Architecture. “But by golly, hospital design has changed dramatically. It’s always changing, so we have to be learning.”
After a strategic review, Nashville General Hospital executives determined that the 1973-built hospital on the Meharry Medical College campus was beyond repair and a new facility was needed. ey will decide on a new location in the coming months.
Meanwhile, a modernization of part of Ascension Saint omas Hospital’s Midtown campus (for which parts were built during the Spanish u outbreak more than a century ago) is underway. A four- oor integrated addition is set to include a new intensive care unit, surgery platforms and prep areas.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center is building vertically, too, with recently announced plans to add a 15-story inpatient tower on the side of a parking structure on its campus.
What makes a hospital construction unlike most any other development is that the building can’t be vacated during the work.
“Renovation projects in a hospital are kind of like trying to change the spark plugs in your car going 75 miles an hour down I-40,” says Rowland. “ e most important thing going on in that hospital is patient care, not construction, so the construction has got to occur around the patient care. It’s like a well-choreographed ballet of how the contractor has to work around the clinical processes in the hospital.”
During construction, utilities have to stay connected and noise has to be kept to a minimum. New duct work has to be able to support the volume in a place where, for example, the air in surgery rooms has to be changed out 20 times per hour, according to James Oaks, regional manager of construction at Medexcel, Ascension Saint omas’ partner on its projects.
Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital Midtown
“ e hospital has so many things, your medical gasses, your electrical — all that type stu — that has to be connected to the new building,” Oaks says. “ ere was a lot of planning that had to go in place there. We were able to utilize feedback and experience from our physician sta , and patients and families. We asked for their opinions on di erent things to try to minimize those issues.”
Contractor Worth Scott, president of Batten Shaw Construction, says stakes are also higher for hospital projects because of the vulnerability of the people inside.
“Health care facilities are built to a higher standard because people are there and maybe immobile or they go there to heal, and in the event of an emergency, whether it be re or disaster or something, it’s where people, for one, would go, but it also needs to be easier for them to get out,” Scott says.
Rowland has seen dramatic changes in the eld between 1985, when he rst started working on hospital design, and now, when he teams with his son and colleague Will Rowland. e elder Rowland’s earlier projects included lots of space for paper health record storage, plus areas to develop and store x-ray lm. With electronic health records, that space evolved into larger computer rooms and, eventually, creating space for electronic infrastructure to support a cloudbased wireless storage system.
Operating rooms have gotten bigger, too, to support all of the robotic tools and technology available to surgeons.
“If you look at a diagram of an operating room, if you see it with nothing in it, it looks like a huge room,” Marc Rowland says. “But all of a sudden when you draw all the elements, operating table, all those carts that have to be there, anesthesia machine, any other imaging equipment that has to be in there, any other devices ... all of a sudden that room’s full.”
MARC ROWLAND, ROWLAND ARCHITECTURE
New hospital design choices are in part aimed at making life easier for nurses, to get them physically closer to their patients and have enough space for the materials they use every day, says Marc Rowland. e goal is to save them time from “hunting and gathering.”
To boost patient satisfaction, the Rowlands lay out more than one waiting area, making additional comfortable spaces for those waiting on test results, for example.
“We’re going to acknowledge the fact that, just like every other human, you get impatient and you want to move to the next step, and we’re going to design the processes with hospitals in such a way that we’re essentially following a Disney-like concept where we’re just keeping people moving,” says Will Rowland.
While other hospitals are building vertically on their existing land, Nashville General is looking to get a new space entirely, ditching the tower model to spread out. Land cost is top-of-mind when it comes to deciding whether to retro t an existing hospital or build new, Scott says. However, that may be less of a concern to Nashville General, which is looking to have land donated by the city.
“It would be cost-prohibitive to try to retro t this hospital building compared to new construction,” says Nashville General Hospital CEO Joseph Webb. “ at’s a common nding in the world of renovation. Oftentimes, the constraints of a structure will not allow you to optimize the function within that structure, so it is much easier and more and more cost-e cient to just build a new structure than it is to try to retro t everything into that existing structure.”
While hospitals spruce up their main campuses, there’s also been a shift to building more freestanding outpatient care centers in the past few decades, Scott says, leaving more high-acuity patients to the main hospital campuses, which cost more to operate, and moving others out to neighboring buildings.
“In general, there’s not as many large, huge hospitals that are going up,” Scott says. “It’s smaller spread out with more of an outpatient type model.”
As patients look to receive care in their own home, hospital designers and contractors discuss plans for softer lighting, gardens and local art. A hospital is not a place most would elect to be, and contractors and designers nd purpose in making the experience manageable for patients while making providers’ jobs easier.
“Our mission is building to make life better, and we feel like we get to create spaces and be part of a place that people can go to heal or go visit a loved one that may be in the process of healing or have something they’re working through,” Scott says. “It’s rewarding in that sense to be able to feel like we’ve o ered help to a community.”
ai16606841607_SV Boom August.pdf 1 8/16/2022 4:09:21 PM
A UNIQUE APPROACH TO REAL ESTATE IN
MIDDLE TENNESSEE Southeast Venture is a full-service real estate company experienced in the development, brokerage, management, and design of properties.
