The main entrance to St. Joseph's Community Hospital includes canopy columns. This spring, CG Schmidt put together the exterior wall framing and structural steel fireproofing.

CG Schmidt puts safety
first for new hospital

It's conceivable that a patient's life could be saved if nurses walk six steps instead of 20 to get from the emergency room to radiology.

Those 14 saved steps per trip, added up over a day, a week or a year, reduce nurse fatigue and, ultimately, mean better care for a patient. It's not as obvious as having the correct medicine on hand, but it was important enough to grab the attention of John Reiling, the president of St. Joseph's Community Hospital and, by extension, the project team led by CG Schmidt that is building a new 186,000-square-foot, four-story hospital for St. Joseph's in Polk.

"Early on, [Reiling's] vision was to drill patient safety into the thought process of the construction manager, architect and engineer so as the hospital was designed and built, we always had that in mind," said Jon Scholz, vice president of project management for CG Schmidt, which is handling construction management for the job. "We went through a process where we had to prove it was a good idea — where radiology should be in relation to the emergency rooms in relation to the patient rooms. That was the master conceptual plan."

But the master plan goes way deeper than department location. It sets a standard for the precise design of each working room in the hospital, reasoning that repetition leads to patient safety.

"When you walk up to a sink to wash your face, the cold is on the right, and the hot is on the left," Scholz said. "We wanted to build that concept into the design. Every patient room, every exam room and every operating room is identical."

Considering that in typical hospitals, patient beds share a common head wall between rooms, making the layout of each room the opposite of its neighbor, the design feature at St. Joseph's will set it apart as the first in the country to have standardized patient rooms.

And it's not too far from realizing that distinction. Scholz said the project, scheduled for a June 2005 completion, has reached the point where steel is standing, masonry work has started, slabs are poured, retention ponds are in place and infrastructure rough-ins are under way.

When it's done, Scholz said, patients can expect the best in safety and service.

"It will be a state-of-the-art, health-care facility that will be a national model for patient safety for its design, construction and patient care," he said. "I get excited about it."

- Chris Thompson