Have you heard about the CCMH Inpatient Room Project?

In the last 37 years, what has changed about you? Have you updated what kind of vehicle you drive? Did you do any construction to your home to make it better suited to your family's needs? Have you updated what clothing you wear or how you style your hair?

Campbell County Memorial Hospital was built in 1980 as a state of the art healthcare facility. However, in the last 37 years, the footprint of the inpatient Intensive Care Unit (ICU), Maternal Child and Medical/Surgical Units have stayed the same. The proposed remodel of our patient care rooms would address this issue.

The current patient care rooms were not built with the needs of today’s care practices in mind. Here are a few of the identified problems:

• Rooms are too small for equipment and family members to visit or stay
• Many of today’s patients are larger and more difficult to move
• Bathrooms are too small to maneuver and don’t have a sink inside the bathroom
• Maternal child rooms don’t function well for how moms and babies receive care
• Staff must walk long distances to and from nursing stations and to stock supplies
• Nurses are getting older as a population group and in our workforce (nursing shortage)

With the help of experts from HGA Architects and Engineers, the project has been in the works for over 1.5 years. Why is it taking so long? Before drawing any floorplans or finalizing the design, we asked the people who do the actual work of patient care; nurses, nursing aides, environmental services and dietary staff to create their ideal vision of what a patient room should be.

Members of the Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC) looked at the project from the patient and family’s point of view, and the team visited other hospitals in the state and across the country to see the best practices in patient room design.

The group used a process called Lean to analyze the current rooms and the workflow. In the simplest terms, Lean thinking looks at how waste can be eliminated to create value. Waste can be defined in many ways, such as the time it takes a nurse to respond to a patient’s call light, or the distance a family must travel to find a space to gather near the patient’s room.

Facilitated by CCH Process Improvement Coordinator Bud Lawrence, data was collected on every aspect of a patient’s experience in their hospital room, down to how many steps a nurse walks each shift to care for their patients. All the data, ideas from the team, ideas from other facilities and the expertise of the architects were brought together to create a larger, more comfortable and efficient room design for medical surgical, ICU and OB patients. The space above the hospital lobby and the current Maternal Child unit will be turned into 39 patient rooms—basically two new patient rooms for every three existing rooms, along with new waiting rooms and gathering spaces for patients and families.

The results from all of this work have helped CCH create a new inpatient room plan:

• Current available beds resized to 39 larger rooms—there will be eight LDRP (Labor/Delivery/Recovery/Postpartum) rooms, four flex rooms, three ante/postpartum rooms, three OB triage rooms, five level 2 nursery rooms, C-section room; 31 Med/Surg rooms (includes four flex rooms); and eight ICU rooms.
• Family zones in the rooms with comfortable furniture
• Inpatient rehab in Med/Surg unit
• Pass through “Nurse Servers” for supplies
• Designated waiting areas and spaces where doctors can meet with families to discuss care
• Sight line from the bed to the bathroom to reduce falls
• Decentralized nursing station—nurses do their work close to the patient
• Accessible outdoor courtyard for patient and staff respite
• Patient lifts in some rooms
• Roman showers
• Nightlights to illuminate the path to the bathroom

Pending approval of the FY 2018 budget, construction is slated to begin spring 2018 and take 20 months to complete, at a cost of $28 million. However, in the next month, two mock patient rooms will be constructed in their final location on the second floor above the Main Lobby sometime this fall. This will enable testing of all the features of these rooms, from the new style roman showers to the size and location of built-in cabinets. The mock rooms will also be tested for the functionality of the new LDRP (Labor/Delivery/Recovery/Postpartum) care process, and during simulated code responses.

Current projections show the project can be funded with existing cash and revenue. The project is included in the FY 18 proposed budget, which will go to the Board for approval on July 20, 2017. No final decisions have been made on funding the project.

CCH Administration is confident that the new patient rooms will create a functionally effective work space and flow, and will serve us well for the next 40 to 50 years. For more information, please visit www.cchwyo.org/ptrooms.