The New Carroll Hospital Center Bed Tower
(Richard Pelletier)
A Conversation with Leslie Simmons, RN, BSN, MS
Vice-President, Patient Care Services Carroll Hospital Center
Can a certain type of hospital room help you to recover more quickly if you are taken ill? The answer, surprisingly, is yes, if designed, as Carroll Hospital Center’s spacious, new private rooms are, with your privacy, comfort and dignity firmly in mind. In the finest tradition of institutional transformation, Carroll Hospital Center has just completed a remarkable sea change in its approach to patient care. Until today, Carroll Hospital Center could claim just 30% of it’s rooms as private, but with the opening of the new patient bed tower, Carroll Hospital Center is now an 80% private room hospital. While privacy and confidentiality were paramount to the overall concept, a number of other well thought out factors shaped the new building’s design. Ms. Leslie Simmons, RN, Carroll Hospital Center’s Vice-President of Patient Care Services for the last three years, is an experienced hospital administrator and she spoke recently of the bed tower’s pod design, paperless patient records, the time that nurses spend with patients and why Carroll Hospital Center is a more attractive workplace for nurses than ever before.
What was behind the decision to build the new bed tower?
Well, the hospital was running a very high occupancy rate – it was clear the daily census was rising. We had a limited number of private rooms and we wanted to create a confidential environment where patients could be in a private room, and where their privacy could be respected and ensured.
How does the bed tower fit into the Carroll Hospital Center care philosophy?
Certainly one of the biggest things is that the patient be kept as comfortable as possible. With a private room, the environment is truly confidential and the family then is allowed greater participation in the care of a loved one. The whole layout is more like home, it’s more subdued and much quieter. Yet it has all the technical advantages of a modern hospital. In a private room, the level of patient confidence goes up. When patients have confidence in the environment and the staff that is attending to them, they respond well.
You seem to be saying that private rooms promote faster recovery. Is this true?
Private rooms allow patients a quieter, calmer environment in which to regain their health. In terms of infection control, it’s a far better scenario to have only one patient per room. In a private room clinicians have less distractions. So patient care and education are then provided in a more conducive environment. In addition, family members can more actively participate in the process in a private room.
Is there a movement in hospitals across the country to increase the number of private rooms?
I would think there would be. Some hospitals in our area already have a high percentage of private rooms and some are looking to convert. I’m not sure I’d call it a big phenomena.
How many beds does the new tower add to the overall number?
The number of beds has increased by 48. It’s not an especially large number, but it is significant. The more important figure I think, is the increase in private rooms. We are moving from a 30% private room hospital to one with 80% private rooms.
As this project moved through the planning stages, did the design team try to anticipate future developments?
Oh, absolutely. We worked closely with our architects, HDR Inc. They are an award winning healthcare design firm with deep experience in hospital design, so that helped enormously. What makes the final design unique in my view, is that we had just tremendous staff input in the actual design of the rooms.
How did the staff participate?
We asked for volunteers. Anyone who volunteered was accepted in order to help us make sure that the final design reflected the needs and desires of the medical staff, and by implication the patients. The architects would arrive for a meeting with drawings that showed square footage allotted to particular functions and the staff would make suggestions – even to the point of saying, “no, the bathroom should go here, the sinks should go there” – our architects would then go back, re-configure the drawings and come back. We went through the process several times until everyone was satisfied. It was quite a process, but the end result is such that the people who work here have had a hand in making this exactly what they need it to be.
What is the pod design that is being talked about?
The pod design is a cluster of four private patient rooms – within the cluster are all the supplies that are needed to support patients in those four rooms. The medications, the supplies a nurse might need to support a patient – all of that is located in the pod. This impacts a patient and a nurse in several ways. First, because everything is located in the pod, a nurse is freed from long walks for supplies or medication, resulting in more time to care for patients, which of course is their primary function. Some studies have shown that nurses have to travel so much to do their job, they aren’t spending nearly enough time with their patients. The pod design directly addresses this. Second, because nurses are motivated by the quality of care they can bring to their patients, our hospital becomes a more attractive place to work. This is critical during a nursing shortage.
Where did the pod idea come from?
I toured several different hospitals. On one particular visit the whole design team saw the pod design in action. The architects generally had wanted us to give them some sense of what we were interested in, so in this case it was a matter of challenging them to come up with a strong pod design that would fit the overall context of what we were trying to achieve.
What about the nursing station?
The nursing station as most people know it, is gone. Everything has been driven to the patients’ bedside. We are implementing a new paperless medical record accessible from anywhere on the floor. No longer will nurses or physicians need to gather at a “station” to look over a patients’ charts. The charts are at the bedside on a computer. The redundancy of paperwork that took nurses away from the patient is over.
What do the new rooms look like?
The new rooms are very spacious, bright and warmly decorated. Each has a large picture window for maximum natural light. A window seat opens into a twin-sized bed for family members. For people who would like some time outdoors when the weather is nice, we also have a meditation garden, just off the main lobby by the chapel.
How long was the tower under construction?
We broke ground last September and we’ll be ready to open this coming December, so about fifteen months.
Large projects like this often have many frustrating moments. Can you recall a moment that frustrated you most?
What comes out of this that’s very challenging is simply the waiting. We are working with systems that have functioned very well for a long time, but are now in need of corrective change. And while there may be a strong desire for that change to take place immediately, it’s too disruptive, knowing that in a year or so everything will change for the better when the tower is completed. One could grow very impatient under such circumstances. So the waiting was quite a challenge.
As Vice-President of patient care services, what do you see as your mission?
My mission is to create an environment that is safe and efficient for nursing staff and to deliver high quality care for the patients we serve. And to be the
preferred workplace for nurses in Carroll County.
Finally, what would you most want people to know about the new bed tower?
What I would like people to know is that confidentiality and privacy are foremost in this new design. The setting is calm and soothing and perhaps best of all, their nurse will now have more time to spend with them.
