St. Joseph’s Community Hospital — Patient Safe Replacement Hospital

Safe and Sound

St. Joseph's breaks the mold with standardized rooms

By Jennifer Pfaff

The St. Joseph’s Community Hospital project was born of a simple premise: People are less likely to make mistakes in a familiar environment.

Think about the gas and brake pedals in a car. If the brakes in some cars operated through the left pedal and in others through the right, there’d probably be more accidents.

Staff at the West Bend hospital theorized the same would hold true in a medical environment: If equipment is in the exact same place in every room, the likelihood of human error goes down, said Jon Scholz, senior vice president of CG Schmidt Inc., Milwaukee.

With that theme in mind, the construction manager took on the job of building a standardized hospital, throwing its full support behind the idea that hospitals should be built on patient safety. The result was the new St. Joseph’s, a 190,000-square-foot, 80-bed hospital that delivers ambulatory, clinical, diagnostic, acute and emergency services.

“Every patient room is identical,” Scholz said. “They are not left- and right-handed rooms.”

Traditional hospitals have a common headwall between patient rooms through which oxygen, water and other equipment can run. Under that configuration, some patients face one end of the building, while others face the opposite end.

That means equipment is located differently depending on what room the patient is in.

That’s not the case at St. Joseph’s.

“The difference is a number of things, from looking at the patient to the gasses in the head wall,” Scholz said. “Everything is in the exact location. It improves the environmental standardization.”

At first blush, it was assumed this deviation from the norm would increase construction costs. Everyone was surprised when that didn’t pan out, Scholz said.


	Project Name: St. Joseph's Community Hospital - Patient Safe Replacement Hospital Location: West Bend Submitting Company: CG Schmidt Inc., Milwaukee Construction Manager: CG Schmidt Inc. Architect: Gresham Smith & Partners, Nashville, Tenn. Engineer: Gresham Smith & Partners Owner: SynergyHealth, West Bend Project Cost: $55 million Project Size: 190,000 square feet Start Date: August 2003 Completion Date: August 2005

“We could prefab multiple items from the headwall system to the point where you didn’t have to install head valves in every ceiling,” he said. “Because it is the same everywhere, you know where it is. It’s under the second tile, or whatever. If you have to get to it, you just pop the tile off.”

But project leaders didn’t leave the design in the realm of theory. To make sure the rooms would be as efficient and functional as possible, a test room was built with cardboard mock-ups of every feature in its place for staff to evaluate.

“The value of actual mock-ups was priceless for them to orient themselves and communicate their expectations,” Scholz said. “It’s a lot easier to change with an eraser than tearing down bricks and mortar.”

Several concerns came to light as the diverse planning team continued studying patient safety. One concern in particular — patients falling as they walk to their bathrooms — demanded careful consideration.

But the project team found a solution by putting all the bathrooms near the head of the bed so grab bars could line the entire path from bed to commode.

“It minimizes distance and keeps a common wall for them to walk along,” Scholz said.

Video monitoring systems are built into every room, creating another way for nurses, doctors and other hospital staff to ensure patient safety.

“It was intriguing how many of the cutting-edge design elements were used in this particular hospital,” Scholz said.