WOMEN & INFANTS OPENS 140,000-SQUARE FOOT SOUTH PAVILION FEATURING NATION'S LARGEST SINGLE-FAMILY ROOM NICU AND A LARGER ANTENATAL CARE CENTER
Providence, Rhode Island (September 14, 2009) /PRNewswire/ — Five years after beginning the approval and construction process, officials at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island today cut the ribbon on the five-story, state-of-the-art South Pavilion.
Designed to help the hospital keep pace with an increased demand for its specialty services, the South Pavilion boasts the largest single-family room neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in the nation, with 70 rooms that give each family private space. There are 80 beds in the two-story NICU, with some rooms designated for families of twins or triplets. The South Pavilion also features a 30-room Antenatal Care Unit with its own amenities suite to help pamper women who find themselves on days and weeks of bed rest during a high-risk pregnancy.
"This is the beginning of a new era at Women & Infants Hospital," noted Constance Howes, president and CEO of the hospital. "With the South Pavilion, our facilities now embody the organization's commitment to being the premier resource for women and newborns in this region. We have the space and the facilities to provide care that is unmatched and, in many cases, leads the industry."
Expanding needs
The construction of the South Pavilion has been in the planning stages for more than five years. The project, which earned state approval in late 2005, adds 140,000 square feet of patient and family space to Women & Infants, which has battled an overcrowding problem from the day it moved to Dudley Street in 1986.
The hospital was built to accommodate 6,500 births a year. Last year, it was the birthplace of almost 10,000 babies. In addition, medical advances have significantly improved the outcomes of premature and distressed newborns, making the NICU busier than anticipated in 1986. The only tertiary care center for newborns in Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Women & Infants' NICU was designed to hold 41 babies but routinely holds as many as 75. The unit records approximately 23,000 patient days each year, a 56-percent increase over 1980 figures and approximately 7,000 days more than anticipated in the 1980s.
"We are a vital resource in this community and want to provide the type of facility that can meet the needs of women and the tiniest, neediest patients in our NICU," Howes added.
ONWARD Campaign
The decision to build the South Pavilion led to the launch of The ONWARD Campaign, the largest capital campaign in Women & Infants' 125-year history. The Campaign – propelled by five challenge grants, including two from the Carter Family Charitable Trust – achieved an unprecedented $22.7 million in gifts and pledges. These matching challenge grants of $4.5 million resulted in gifts totaling more than $9.5 million, or 45 percent of the ONWARD Campaign's total, and helped secure more seven-, six- and five- figure gifts than ever received by the hospital in any previous fund-raising campaigns.
The response to the Campaign, notes Constance A. Howes, Women & Infants' president and CEO, was tremendous.
"I am overwhelmed by the community's response to this Campaign and the recognition of Women & Infants as a tremendous community resource. We've seen support from all over the state and the region. In addition, those closest to Women & Infants—employees, faculty, and community physicians—collectively have contributed more than 10 percent of gifts and pledges made to ONWARD," Howes states. "We have been blessed to have the leadership of Anne and Michael Szostak as our Campaign co-chairs. They have worked tirelessly to bring together an extraordinary number of volunteers who have helped us to reach this unprecedented level of support."
The new look
In planning the expansion, it was crucial that the South Pavilion blend with the existing building, both visually and in more intangible ways. It was necessary to capture the essence of Women & Infants, particularly the hospital's patient- and family-centered approach to health care.
"Our role in the life of our patients and their families is fleeting. We strive in that time to make them healthy and comfortable in all ways," Howes says.
The hospital charged its construction team – the Boston health care design firm of Anshen + Allen and construction management firm Walsh Brothers, Inc., of Providence and Boston – with designing and building a patient- and family-centric addition. The goal was to create a fresh, cohesive look for the hospital, not merely add five floors to the east side of the campus.
"We created a synthesis that balances functionality, aesthetics, economy and sustainability," explains Jay Verspyck, AIA, LEED® AP, associate principal with Anshen + Allen. "Great attention was given to every aspect of the design, down to the finest detail, to provide a healing environment that is technologically sophisticated while also providing a comforting, dignified experience for both patients and their families."
Benefits for babies
Care for critically ill newborns has evolved significantly since the early 1970s, when preterm infants were cared for in regular nurseries with additional staff and attention. For the last three decades, most NICUs, including the one at Women & Infants, have been brightly lit and noisy most of the day. The NICU in the South Pavilion incorporates an emerging model of care – the single-family room.
The new NICU takes up 50,000 square feet over two floors, replacing a unit that measured 9,400 square feet, where staff would bustle around incubators sitting feet apart in cramped bays.
The babies, according to Pediatrician-in-Chief James Padbury, MD, thrive when the environment – the sound, light and temperature – can be tailored to their individual needs.
"The single-room NICU expands the field of neonatology from 'survival' to 'quality of life,'" notes Dr. Padbury, the Oh-Zopfi Professor of Pediatrics for Perinatal Research at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
The unit is already the site of revolutionary research into the effect of single-family rooms on infant outcomes. The research team – led by Barry Lester, PhD, director of Women & Infants' Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk – will compare medical and neurobehavioral status at discharge of babies treated in Women & Infants' former NICU with those treated in the single-family unit. They will also examine the effect of the new single-family unit on parental stress levels and staff satisfaction.
"This study will influence the design of NICUs around the nation and the world for the next decade," Dr. Padbury says.
In addition to providing a space that is more beneficial for the hospital's tiniest and sickest babies, the new NICU also caters to the needs of their parents, providing several family areas, including a two-story lounge, sibling play area with a massive salt water fish tank, kitchen, showers, and a resource center with computers.
Women first
The South Pavilion also enables Women & Infants to offer a unified array of high-risk obstetrics specialty services that is incomparable in the region.
The fourth floor of the new building is home to a spacious 30-bed Antenatal Care Unit that draws on the skills of the hospital's internationally-renowned maternal-fetal medicine and obstetric medicine specialists to help high-risk women maintain their pregnancies and give birth to babies that are closer to full-term. The services are coordinated in an environment that encourages partnership with the patients' community obstetricians, midwives and their families.
The unit features private rooms that are larger and offer space for loved ones, as well as private bathrooms with showers. The floor also offers an amenities suite to help pamper women who can be on monitored rest for weeks leading up to childbirth. There is a professionally equipped hairdressing salon area for private hairdressers to use during their patient visits, a massage room, space for alternative therapies, a washer and dryer, and exercise equipment.
Going green
The South Pavilion represents a new era in construction as one of the first hospital buildings in the northeast to be certified as "green" by the U.S. Green Building Council in Washington, DC, through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) program.
The designation recognizes construction that has less of an impact on the environment and achieves specific, nationally-accepted benchmarks for construction and operation. It is based on points earned by making choices of materials, layout, building systems and other aspects of design and construction that relate to energy conservation and a sustainable environment.
Architects with Anshen + Allen designed the building to achieve LEED certification for energy use, lighting, water, material and a variety of other sustainable strategies. Projects are awarded LEED certification ratings based on the number of points they achieve. The design phase of the South Pavilion earned enough points to qualify for basic LEED certification. The project could reach silver certification upon final examination after the building opens.
Cutting the ribbon
Lisa Curtis of Tiverton offered a parent's perspective on the value of the new South Pavilion.
"When I toured this new building, it's no surprise it has the latest technology and computer systems and is leading the way in environmental design. But to me the important thing is that it feels more like a home than the original space," says Curtis, whose younger son Andrew spent four months in the NICU. "This building is something we could not have dreamed of – it's a new home, a better home, for moms, dads, babies and families. When you take a family like Women & Infants and give them a new home like this, more miracles are bound to happen."
She was joined at the ceremonial ribbon cutting by Howes, and Anne and Mike Szostak, co-chairmen of the ONWARD capital campaign supporting the construction of the South Pavilion.
Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, a Care New England hospital, is one of the nation's leading specialty hospitals for women and newborns. The primary teaching affiliate of The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University for obstetrics, gynecology and newborn pediatrics, Women & Infants is the seventh largest obstetrical service in the country with more than 9,000 births per year. Women & Infants has been designated as a Breast Center of Excellence from the American College of Radiography; a Center for In Vitro Maturation Excellence by SAGE In Vitro Fertilization; and a Neonatal Resource Services Center of Excellence. It is one of the largest and most prestigious research facilities in high risk and normal obstetrics, gynecology and newborn pediatrics in the nation, and is a member of the National Cancer Institute's Gynecologic Oncology Group. The hospital was named Rhode Island's Best Place to Work by Providence Business News and a National Center of Excellence in Women's Health by the federal government. For information about Women & Infants, log on to www.womenandinfants.org, and for the name of a physician on the Women & Infants' staff, call the Health Line at 1-800-921-9299.
