Alexian Brothers Medical Center Ambulatory Mall, Bed Tower Taking Shape
A five-level tower under construction at Alexian Brothers Medical Center (ABMC) will help to boost the overall percentage of private beds at the hospital to nearly 80 percent, enhancing patients’ privacy, safety and convenience.
Scheduled for completion in the fall of 2009, the tower will add 108 private beds to the Elk Grove Village, Ill., hospital, positioning ABMC strongly in a hospital market that is racing to keep pace with growing patient demand for private rooms, says Mary Ann Magnifico, ABMC Vice President of Construction and Support Services.
“The majority of patients would like to be by themselves,” she says. “They don’t want to be with someone they don’t know in their sickest time… Everybody is going that way. It’s not only consumer-driven, but it’s also better for infection control and patient safety.”
Having more private rooms also will enhance ABMC’s ability to apply the Alexian Brothers’ values of dignity of the person and compassion, Magnifico says. Patients in private rooms will have their own shower, toilet and sink, and there will be a sofa bed in each room so loved ones can stay overnight.
The new tower will include a ground-level ambulatory care mall, where diagnostic services now scattered across the hospital will be centralized. These services will include computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), diagnostic imaging, nuclear medicine, ultrasound testing, non-invasive cardiology testing, and pre-surgical testing. The mall also will include an outpatient laboratory and an outpatient pharmacy, as well as admitting and registration for all inpatient and outpatient services.
“For patients, it will be awesome,” Magnifico says. “They will just come in and have the majority of non-invasive services in one location. It will be one-stop shopping, basically, for all their services.”
For staff members, the centralization of ambulatory-care services will foster greater efficiencies. Instead of walking across the hospital or taking elevators or stairs to consult with colleagues in other ambulatory-care departments, staff members only will have to walk down the hall. “The staff will be more cohesive because they all will be in the same area,” Magnifico says.
The first floor above the ground level will house ABMC’s new intensive-care and cardiovascular intensive-care units, which will include 27 private rooms and nine private rooms, respectively. The rooms will be larger than those in ABMC’s current ICU units to facilitate movement while allowing enough space for the equipment required to treat and to monitor ICU patients.
The second and third floors above the tower’s ground level each will feature 36 private rooms for general medical/surgery patients. In addition to a private bathroom, each room also will feature a separate sink for staff use, and “that helps with infection control,” Magnifico says.
The fourth floor above the ground level will house mechanical systems that will enable ABMC to add two more floors to the tower without interrupting services to the floors below. “It is a possibility, not a definite plan, that we could go up two more floors in the future,” Magnifico says. Additional mechanical systems will be housed in the tower’s basement.
In addition to building the new bed tower, plans call for converting semi-private rooms in ABMC’s existing bed tower into private rooms. Like the rooms in the new bed tower, the converted rooms will feature a private bathroom for the patient and a separate sink for staff members.
With the new configuration, ABMC will be licensed to have a total of 387 beds, including 257 for general medical/surgery patients, 28 for obstetrics patients, 36 for ICU patients, and 66 for rehabilitation patients. The total compares with 403 beds previously. “When we went for our new certificate of need, there was an adjustment, because the state says our area is overbedded,” Magnifico says. Other hospitals in the area have experienced similar reductions, she says.
After the new bed tower is completed, ABMC intends to expand other hospital services into spaces now occupied by ambulatory-care departments that will be moving to the tower’s ground floor. For example, the area now used for ultrasound testing will be used for an expanded women’s center and pharmacy, which is scheduled for completion in 2010, Magnifico says.
Other construction projects were continuing apace at the hospital in November, including a new chapel, which is expected to open during the first quarter of 2008, and “The Gateway Project,” a landscaped area at the southeast corner of ABMC’s campus that will feature a statue of Jesus Christ surrounded by a fountain.
A variety of infrastructure improvements also were under way, including expansion of the hospital’s powerhouse. A key objective is reducing energy costs by becoming more energy-efficient, Magnifico says.
New Ambulatory Mall, Bed Tower
November 9, 2007
