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Bon Secours Mercy Hospital will unveil its new Harbour View medical center to the public during a community open house on May 3 and a ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 5. The first patient will be treated on May 6. The new building at 1020 Bon Secours Drive will add 18 “smart” inpatient rooms and four operating rooms to the preexisting Bon Secours campus.

President Andy Spicknall and Vice President of Nursing Kristen McSorley highlighted some of the most anticipated features, including private inpatient rooms, increased comfort for visitors, a more efficient workflow for nurses, and new and improved technology.

The second floor is home to large family waiting areas and inpatient rooms.

McSorley pointed out the nursing station alcoves along the walls between patient rooms. These alcoves will help improve workflow and increase patient safety, allowing a nurse to sit at a computer while still having a direct line of sight to their patient. 

“Also, if you think about it, you’re a patient, and you need something, really, that response time to the call light is, you know, decreased when you’re sitting here, right where your patient is,” she said.

The inpatient rooms also have frosted glass doors. The windows looking into the patient’s room from the nurse alcove are controlled by a switch that flips between frosted and clear glass. The switches are located on the inside and outside of the room, so both nurses and patients can control the level of privacy. 

Spicknall added that patients will have increased privacy even from the hallway. Because the windows are angled, it’s difficult to see into a room while walking past. 

All of the patient rooms have pull-out sofa beds, floor-to-ceiling windows, an electronic whiteboard, a TV, and a bathroom.

McSorley said they asked their staff what was important to them when designing the new rooms. The biggest requests, she said, weren’t about kinds of equipment, but where the equipment should be.

The hospital staff decided on everything from the location of the computer to the shelving units and gloves and hand sanitizer to ensure a better workflow.

The bathrooms are also bigger and redesigned to allow nurses to pivot and turn with their patients, as that was a voiced concern.

New electronic whiteboards and patient room plates were also created with nurse requests in mind. 

The electronic whiteboards “adhere to what the patients need to understand and see,” McSorley said, such as dietary restrictions, mobility, and medication orders. She added patients will also be able to see what doctors and nurses are treating them.

The room plate on the outside of the patient’s door will display any information visitors and employees should know before entering. This could include taking necessary precautions against an infectious disease or knowing about any mobile limbs.

“This actually is derived from an order in the computer,” McSorley said about the room plates. “So when the order goes in the computer, it automatically will show up, which is a huge safety win for us.”

Without the use of the electronic nameplates, the same information is displayed on a laminated sheet that’s displayed on the door.

Spicknall said they are calling the rooms “smart” patient rooms, because of all the added technology features.

In addition to the whiteboard and room plate, he said the rooms will have sensors to detect if a fall-risk patient is trying to get up on their own. The sensor will send an alert to the nurse prior to the bed alarm going off so they can intervene before a patient gets hurt.

Sensors on all the patient beds also provide time frames for when the patient should be repositioned to avoid pressure injuries from lying in one position for too long.

The medical center team hopes to implement AI technology after the center opens, converting conversations between employees and patients into digital notes. 

“That is one of the pieces of technology nursing is most excited about,” McSorley said. “Because it allows them to spend more time with their patient. They’re not running off to the computer trying to document all of that. In real time, the room is alleviating that stressor for them so that then they can attend to the patient’s pain, do whatever they need to do in that moment to ensure that the patient is well taken care of.”

Pre-operative rooms are located on the first floor. This is where patients will go to be prepared for procedures. McSorley explained this includes going over any pre-admission testing or labs, making sure all consent forms are signed, and starting an IV or any kind of pre-operative fluids.

Spicknall said one of the main focuses when designing the pre-operative rooms was to ensure patient privacy with sliding frosted glass doors, which is also used for the inpatient rooms.

“A lot of times there may be curtains or bays in these pre-operative areas, and so really, to create that sense of privacy for our patients, knowing this is a very anxious time for our patients, and then you’ll see in a lot of our rooms, we’re able to get a lot of natural light into that space, just to help patients remain calm as they’re preparing for their surgery,” he said.

Along the perpendicular wall are a few post-surgical rooms, where patients will go after waking up from anesthesia and be taken care of by a nurse.

McSorley said two nursing stations in the middle of the floor are better for nurse and patient flow than one station.

The four operating rooms are equipped to handle minimally invasive robot-assisted surgeries with large screens to display what the robot sees. General, bariatric, and orthopedic surgeries will be the most commonly treated.

During the community open house, McSorley said visitors are encouraged to look at the operating rooms to help them feel more comfortable with any surgeries they may have at the new medical center.

Spicknall said the building’s groundbreaking started in October 2022, and construction was completed on March 31. After the ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 5, the center will see its first patient on May 6. 

Spicknall said about 100 new employees were hired to staff the building, and over the next few weeks, the remaining medical supplies will be brought in and the staff will run drills to familiarize themselves with the layout of the building and where all their materials will be kept. 

“This is state-of-the-art technology within healthcare,” Spicknall said, “and it’s really exciting that we’re the first one within Bon Secours Mercy Health, within our organization, to be able to implement it.” 

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