More Comfort and Safety

Patient Safety

The design of the South Pavilion helps improve healthcare quality and outcomes in a number of key areas, with one of the most important being matters related to patient safety.

Here are some building features and their direct links to matters of patient safety:

• Private rooms to promote lower infection rates due to not passing infections between patients in two-bed rooms. Private rooms also reduce the need to transfer patients from room to room, and provide more space for patients and their families.
• Two sinks per room – one immediately inside the patient room and one in the patient bathroom – to allow for better access to hand-washing stations.
• Privacy windows from the hallway into patient rooms to view the patient while protecting patient privacy, keeping doors closed for noise reduction, and improving patient sleep.
• Standardized (“same-sided”) room layout so clinical staff doesn’t have to re-orient themselves each time they enter a room.
• Handrails in patient rooms from the head wall of the bed to bathrooms so patients can stabilize themselves when walking. Patients never have to cross the room to access the bathroom.
• Bariatric accommodations, rooms and toilets to help reduce falls and staff injuries due to appropriately sized equipment.
• Negative pressure patient rooms to isolate patients with certain types of infectious diseases.
• Configuration of floors includes three distinct patient care centers to gain efficiencies in staff by reducing walking distances and increasing direct patient care time.
• Large door openings to patient rooms to easily get in and out with patients and equipment.
• Call light system has calls go directly to the nurse’s phone, and if not answered, gets automatically transferred to another practitioner.
• Specialized security systems in high-risk areas to prevent infant or child abductions.
• High-tech beds that can go low to the floor if the patient is a fall risk; alarms that warn of patients getting out of bed who may need assistance; and mattress surfaces that help prevent pressure ulcers.