October 21, 2011

Virginia Mason opening new medical pavilion

Photo by Lara Swimmer [enlarge]

Jones Pavilion is at Spring Street and Boren Avenue.

Virginia Mason Medical Center is holding a grand opening ceremony tomorrow for its 350,000-square-foot Floyd & Delores Jones Pavilion at Spring Street and Boren Avenue in Seattle.

The hospital also is holding an open house for its new 14,500-square-foot emergency department, which is located in the pavilion and will open on Nov. 2.

The new emergency department has 17 treatment rooms, including a procedure room, a decontamination area, a satellite lab to quickly run common tests, a pneumatic tube connection to the main laboratory, and its own radiology and CT scanner suite.

A hospital press release says the emergency department's waiting room is as small as a strip-mall coffee shop. It was designed that way because there won't be much waiting for emergency services, due to improved hospital processes and an efficient layout that included input from doctors, nurses, paramedics and patients.

Incoming emergency room patients who are not acutely ill will be moved to the adjacent Patient Accelerated Care Environment unit, where they will receive individual care and then be discharged or admitted to the hospital.

Photo by Lara Swimmer [enlarge]

Acute-care beds are on the 11th floor.

“Hospitals all over the country are spending millions of dollars to build huge emergency departments to cope with the rising demand for care, instead of putting resources into figuring out how to deliver the care that people need more efficiently,” said Virginia Mason Chairman and CEO Gary S. Kaplan in a statement.

“I genuinely believe this ED will be a model for the entire nation. Our design efforts focused first on engaging our staff and the community to generate ideas on how to improve the care processes and only then turned to designing the physical space to support delivering that care as quickly and efficiently as possible,” Kaplan said.

Kevin McCain, project executive with general contractor Skanska, said Jones Pavilion has 18 floors, including six below grade. Acute-care beds are on the 17,000-square-foot 11th floor, the emergency department takes up the seventh floor, and a central utility floor is on the second level. The remaining floors are shell-and-core space.

McCain said construction costs of $154 million included the shell-and-core plus tenant improvements on the two floors. He said the building is unique in that it has eight floors for hospital space, each with its own interstitial mechanical/utility floor. Hospital floors are 21 feet, but drop to 10.5 feet where the smaller interstitial floors are. About a third of each hospital floor is affected by the interstitial space.

McCain said the interstitial floors give the hospital flexibility to create an isolated level in case of a contagion or outbreak. It also gives the hospital the ability to create surgical rooms or other types of space on any of the levels.

According to McCain, it was challenging to connect the pavilion to the existing hospital because links were made at several floors occupied by patients. Crews had to remove a stair tower to connect the two buildings.

McCain said the hospital is planning to build out part of level five with procedure rooms. That work would probably start in the next few months, he said.

The Jones Pavilion team is: NBBJ, architect; Magnusson Klemencic Associates, structural engineer; Notkin, mechanical engineer; Sparling, electrical engineer; MacDonald-Miller, mechanical subcontractor; and Veca Electric & Technologies, electrical subcontractor. Skanska is also working smaller projects at the existing hospital.