Sacred Heart Medical Center, Eugene’s largest hospital, is preparing to relocate to a state-of-the-art facility in Springfield after a more than 10-year quest for a new facility.
Sacred Heart’s new RiverBend Campus on the McKenzie River, slated for completion in 2008, will replace facilities currently located in downtown Eugene, allowing those buildings to be entirely revamped and modernized.
Sacred Heart has been working on either a remodel or a new site altogether for more than 10 years, Brian Terrett of Public Affairs and Communications said.
Once the new campus is built, Sacred Heart will begin work at demolishing the oldest parts of the Hilyard Street campus. Several of the buildings, most of which line the alleyway between Hilyard and Alder streets, will be destroyed. The alleyway will be gone.
No new buildings are planned, and the current campus will be significantly smaller than before, leaving the RiverBend campus as the primary area hospital for seven surrounding counties.
“Nearly 65 percent of the buildings will go away,” Terrett said.
The current hospital campus will be remodeled with a new main entrance facing Alder Street toward the rows of restaurants, shops and cafes next to the University. The hospital will replace the razed buildings with park-like green space and some additional parking on the Alder Street side of the hospital campus. Even though more than half of the actual structures will be gone, the campus will remain the same size.
The new campus will house a geriatrics unit, a behavioral unit and a specialty unit that has not yet been determined. The hospital will also retain an emergency room.
The left over buildings will receive a complete remodel, updating the patient rooms drastically and revamping the technological aspects of the hospital.
The current patient rooms will be replaced with patient-family suites. The new rooms are undergoing several generations of updates, Terrett said. Currently, one model of the new-room design is in use at the Hilyard Street campus. The hospital already has 500 changes that will be put into effect for the final design based on suggestions made by nurses, patients and families.
“It’s meant to be a healing environment,” Terrett said.
Researchers went to 30 different hospitals to determine what the new Sacred Heart campuses needed to make a comfortable healing room for the patient.
The suites will be larger, to accommodate the needs of a family. The hospital will no longer designate visiting hours, but leave enough space in the room for families to come and go as needed.
The room will feature, along with the bed and nursing station, a sofa for the family and a cabinet for storage with display room for flowers and other gifts.
The linoleum floors will be replaced with a wood laminate, the doorways will be lined with wood and the rooms will be lit with muted bulbs giving the space a more comfortable home feel.
Patients who are comfortable in their environment will stay for a shorter amount of time and be healthier, Terrett said.
Each room will have data ports for computers used by nurses as well as patients and their family members.
The ceilings will have tracks for hydraulic lifts to carry patients from the bed to the large bathrooms.
Both hospitals will also prepare for unknown technological advances in an effort to avoid problems with the current campus.
“The majority of the (current) campus is 40 years or more old,” Terrett said. “We can’t use older parts of the hospital for newer technologies.”
The hospital currently distributes information primarily through laptop computers. The network wiring has been difficult to install in the older wings of the building, which were not built for the digital age.
Hallways in the older wings are crowded with extensive wiring running along the ceiling.
Data pipes planned for the new hospital and the Hilyard remodel will be oversized for any additional wiring that may be necessary in the future.
Between the two campuses, Sacred Heart will grow from around 600,000 square feet to more than 1 million square feet combined. Currently the hospital has 432 beds. When the renovations on the Hilyard Street campus are done there will be a total of 474 beds between the two campuses; the Hilyard Street campus will hold 104.