New Gundersen St. Josephs Hospital and Clinics heads towards completion
With an opening slated for June 15th, construction is on schedule for the new state-of-the-art hospital in Hillsboro, Wisconsin.
Dan Howard, the hospital’s Director of Marketing & Public Relations, noted key points that included the layout of the building that is designed with the patient and provider relationship very much in mind, and leveraging providers’ time while they are engaged in their duties at the clinic and hospital.
“We have a lot of visiting specialists that come here from La Crosse. The relationship, particularly on the second floor, between the clinic, specialty clinic and the surgery, the relationship between those departments is very crucial because your primary provider is the one who is basically your general contractor for your healthcare. When there is a need that arises that requires a specialist, the primary provider will refer you to a specialist,” Howard said.
He stated the hope is that those primary care providers and specialists will be able to co-mingle and be in the same environment, so they will be able to share ideas, thoughts, and approaches to patient care.
In addition, many of those specialists perform surgery. Surgery is on the same floor, across the hall from the specialist clinic. The specialists can come out of clinic, go into surgery, perform surgery, and come back out. While they are cleaning up from the surgery, that specialist can see a clinic patient and go back and do surgery again, ultimately maximizing their time and increasing efficiency.
“We took into account how many steps it takes a particular staff member to do this, and how far things are away from each other. For example, the relationship on the ground floor between the emergency room, the inpatient wing, and the emergency room nurses station. The emergency nurses’ station and the impatient nurses’ station are about 15 feet apart. That’s how far they are in our current facility and that saves us half a million dollars a year with that relationship. We can have staff go from the inpatient nurses’ station, move over to the ER to help and vice versa. We are really maximizing our staff,” he said.
The new facility will also offer chemotherapy with onsite production, and Howard said providers will start off administering to the patients they can under the guidance of directors. “We will be getting into it slowly, and progressing through it as we build up more confidence and ability. That is going to be a big deal for patients fighting cancer in this area.”
With efficiency the goal throughout the building, the emergency room was built next to the imaging suite. The CT scanner is the closest imaging equipment to the ER, which is commonly used in emergency situations. Taking into account those proximities, Howard shared if you can save a staff member from having to walk 100 feet, and they only have to go 20 feet, you do that over the course of a year or ten years, you are saving time, you are saving money, and are giving the patient the best experience as well.
As part of being a state-of-the-art facility, a decontamination unit has been built in the emergency room. In situations such as a fertilizer spill in the farming community, Howard said they would not want them entering the emergency room exposing patients and staff to any hazardous material. Howard stressed that there could be a number of situations where a decontamination unit would be paramount in treating ER patients properly. “Let’s say there is a drug bust somewhere and we have people coming in with suspected meth on their clothes, they come into the decontamination suite and are decontaminated, and then brought straight to the emergency rooms. In the current building, we do not have that. We have an outdoor tent that has sprinkler systems and we are trained in using that, but it is much nicer to have that in the building as part of the ER.”
Howard said lot of people are surprised at how quickly the new facility has come along. “When we tell them we will be opening in six months, and will actually have the keys in about three months, they are really surprised! The most common things that we hear from people who take a look around the building are: they really like the inpatient rooms, the large windows that take up almost a full end of the room and (the windows) are actually a lot lower so the patient can see the lake from the bed. That seems to be one of the things that people really appreciate. The thought on how well it is being planned out, people seem to like the fact that you are not going to have to go a long way to get a service. You aren’t going to have to go up a flight of stairs for certain services, although an elevator is available. It’s been designed from the inside out with the patient experience in mind. A lot of people comment on how big it feels in that building, even though that building is about 10,000 square feet smaller than the current one. I think that is in part the fact that the walls in the new building are 10 feet high, while in the old hospital they were only 8 feet.”
The curvature of the building around the lake Howard acknowledges, is in order to maximize the amount of space that facility has on the footprint. When you look on the interior elements, the ceilings are layered and there is a curvature on inside the ceilings as well. Howard noted the curves are inspired by the common practice of contouring crop fields in the surrounding farmlands. “When you are driving through Vernon County, you can see all of this contouring going on. In the atrium, there is going to be a little of that as well. There will be the pattern on the floor, pattern on the ceiling, and that pattern will continue out the glass windows of the atrium being incorporated in that lawn-kind of garden at the front of the building,” he said.
Keys to the facility will be handed over by the CD Smith Construction Company on March 31st, then there will be about two and a half months of getting things ready in the new facility. Desks, Information Technology, and telephones will need to be set up and put together. Furniture will be brought in, the artwork placed on walls, and the facility history and donor wall completed. “It’s like when you build a house, the construction guys will put the walls and siding in, but you’ve got to make it your own. You have to put the couch in there, the tv, and all that kind of stuff. That’s what we will be doing for those couple of months.”
Having held a few sneak peek tours of the facilities progress, Howard said they are looking at having more community tours in May, where people will be able to walk around the entire facility. “After that, it will be locked down, and our environmental service staff will be doing a full-deep sterile clean. During the weekend of June 13th through the 15th, various departments will start moving over. Some of the offices will have moved during that week. On the 14th, around 3 am we are planning on switching over the ER. We are a critical access Hospital so we have to be fully operational 24/7. The first patients that will be coming through the clinic will be June 15th. That’s when people will be coming to the Hillsboro Clinic in the new facility and seeing their specialists.”
Howard stressed the organization’s immense gratitude to all of the donors, and admitted there are parts of this project that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for donors coming forward, including the community.
It is important to note that a capital fund aimed at ensuring complete funding was available for the new facility was met on December 3rd, totaling just over $2 million. “In the beginning when we went live, we had the flood. To still reach that $2M after the flood was amazing! Every single nickel, dime, and cent, plus the hundreds of thousands of dollars that was given, is all going into this project,” Howard said with a smile.
As for the old facility, after the new clinics and hospital is in full operation, there will be about six weeks for asbestos abatement, and then it will be taken down. “The goal is to have the new parking lot laid by November 5th, and the landscaping to be completed this time next year (2021). There is still a lot of things to do, but it will be amazing once we get over there,” Howard said enthusiastically.
Photos provided by Gundersen St. Joseph’s clinics and hospital
