In an effort to meet the goals of BWH's Strategic Plan and to meet the growing needs of our patients, families and employees, the hospital is busily planning a Growth Plan that will be implemented from now until 2007.BWH leaders realize that it is a large task to try to expand programs in a campus that is already under tremendous space constraints. In order to make needed changes a reality, moving various departments to other parts of the main campus, to buildings in close proximity to the main campus or to off-site locations farther from the main campus have to take place in a specific chronological fashion.
Physician leaders, including chairs Steven Seltzer, MD, Ron Walls, MD an Michael Zinner, MD, have been serving on subcommittees with hospital senior management and other administrators to continually develop creative solutions to meeting BWH’s space needs. The Plan poses a complex series of maneuvers related to many departments and specialties currently residing at the main campus of the hospital.
To start the Growth Plan in progress, key moves and expansions will take place by next fall. Specifically, two new operating rooms will be opened on L1 by October 1; inpatient gynecology and gynecologic oncology will be moved from Tower 15 to the seventh floor of the Connors Center in October; and one ten-bed pod will be opened by October 15. These are the initial moves in what will prove to be a domino effect of moves by the conclusion of 2007. In addition to the two new ORs to be added to L1 in the fall of 2002, two additional ORs will be re-commissioned and additional OR support space will be added to accommodate growing storage, administrative and locker room needs.
Additional imaging space is also being planned. On L2, both the Radiation Oncology and angiography services will be expanded, while a new MRT suite will be added to the floor plan.
The expansion of Imaging Services on L2 serves as one of the key parts of the Plan. “The demand for Radiology services has made it imperative for BWH to create more imaging space to serve our patients’ needs,” said Seltzer.
Zinner and surgeons within the Department of Surgery will also experience comparable OR growth. “The renovated and new ORs in addition to accompanying support space will incease our capacity to meet our surgical goals over the next several years. Our growth over the past five years has not seen comparable increases in the needed resources to care for the increasingly complex patients we see,” said Zinner.
With such expansion on L2 and elsewhere in the hospital, certain departments’ locations will shift. According to senior management, many departments have already settled into off-site buildings over the last five years and the footprint of BWH will continue to grow in the months and years to come.
One area that will be relocated is the Department of Emergency Medicine’s academic and administrative offices. “The growth of our department has created space needs that can no longer be met in the main hospital buildings, and there are critical needs on BWH’s main campus,’ said Walls. He added that the department leadership is working very closely with senior administration and planning to relocate the expanded programs to new space in Neville House over the next few months.
When compared to comparable academic medical centers, BWH falls short of allotted space, given its high patient volume. According to the hospital’s space planning consultants, BWH’s 1.7 million square feet of space to serve 334,969 patients ranks significantly less than the benchmark minimum for academic teaching hospitals in urban settings.
Look for more information on BWH's Growth Plan in future issues of BWH Medical Staff News.