by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | March 06, 2020
We also had surprising feedback regarding even things like door choices. We thought patients would prefer full steel doors. As we talked to patients though, they said that was actually scary to them. They wanted for us, the healthcare team members, to be able to see them, but also wanted to have the ability to shut that view off if they needed to. So we have blinds built into the windows in the doors.
Conference rooms will be located on the first floor to help us communicate as teams. Being an academic medical center, the planning for that area was actually driven by what I think is the big connection to our community. As a Level 1 trauma center, we take our responsibility in disaster preparedness and treatment very seriously. Our community comes to us when tornados hit, or any other disaster. So, those educational conference rooms all have walls that go up, allowing us to provide a space for hundreds of people in the case that we ever experience a large disaster. We can convene, communicate and coordinate disaster response in this area.
Patient Room, Renderings provided by Perkins and Will
HCB News: Will the staffing for the new tower be from existing staff or new hires?
KG: We have significant recruitment plans already initiated and have hired additional recruiters. We already hired some perioperative staff before Christmas so they can be appropriately trained before we open. There will be a cascade of new staff — ICU nurses have to be hired by spring, medical surgical by summer, housekeeping by August. We’re not planning for every piece of the new facility to be 100 percent staffed on day one, but we’re looking for 100 to 200 new hires initially, and when the facility is complete and fully staffed, it will take somewhere between 400 and 500 additional new full-time employees.
HCB News: How do you think healthcare will or should change over the next five to 10 years to make it sustainable?
KG: I think healthcare cannot stand alone in different aspects of delivery of care. We have to join together to create that continuum for two reasons. The first is that it increases the quality of care for patients because it forces communications between providers that sometimes is otherwise siloed. Separately, at least in Oklahoma, not from the delivery side, but resource side, Medicaid expansion is something that’s necessary. The second is because it’s cost-effective; it maximizes utilization of resources.
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