Julie Koch lay on a stretcher at the patient entrance of Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield, waiting to be admitted. Hospital personnel surrounded her, one holding an intravenous line near the bed and another reaching to change the armband that identified her as a hospital patient.
“I think she’s having a contraction!” yelled Jill Helmberger, who stood near the side of the bed.
It sounds like a typical hospital scene, but here’s the catch: Julie Koch was not a patient, the personnel surrounding her were not attending to her, and Sacred Heart’s RiverBend hospital hasn’t even opened yet.
Koch, an employee at Sacred Heart’s University district hospital on E. 13th Avenue and Hilyard Street, was one of about 40 employee volunteers who participated in a simulated move in preparation for the new hospital’s Aug. 10 opening. Employees will be expected to move as many as 300 patients now housed at the University district hospital to the new, larger location in 10 hours or less. Tuesday’s was the first of three mock moves leading up to the opening day.
“We’ve been working on this for a very long time,” said Margaret Harriff, the project’s coordinator. She said the new Springfield hospital, which is eight stories high, “two football fields wide” and will eventually house up to 2,000 employees and hundreds of patients, has been under construction since 2005 and is nearing completion. In 2006, the Portland Daily Journal of Commerce listed the hospital as the largest construction project in Oregon.
Project Manager Robert McFarlane said the team involved in the coordination of the move has tried to be as meticulous as possible in their planning. In preparation for the mock move, McFarlane took three rides in an ambulance from the Hilyard Street hospital to the new location just off of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Springfield. After taking three different routes, he deduced that the ambulance would be able to make the trip in 10 to 15 minutes, depending on traffic.
At the patient entrance, Koch, positioned in her stretcher, checked the stopwatch around her neck. “We can’t start,” she said. “The ambulance hasn’t gotten here yet.”
Why the practice move?
RiverBend, Sacred Heart Medical Center’s newest and biggest hospital, is set to open Aug. 10. On that day, employees will move up to 300 patients from Sacred Heart’s Hilyard Street location to the new facility. Eventually, about 2,000 people will work at the new branch, serving hundreds of patients.
When the stopwatch hit 15 minutes, a woman stepped up to the side of the bed on cue. “Welcome to RiverBend,” she said. “I’m Jackie from administration. I’m going to take off your armband and put on a new one. Can you tell me your last name?”
Koch examined the sheet of fake information in her hand. “Gravely,” she said.
The woman burst out laughing. “That’s a bad name! Who picked Gravely?”
The mock patient and her attendees set off down the hall – which was covered in plastic and smelled like fresh paint – and wheeled the bed into a large elevator.
After a journey through the halls of the sixth floor and a brief pause in an empty patient room, volunteers wheeled the stretcher back down to the ground floor and Koch stopped her watch.
“We did all six practice rounds under an hour,” said Harriff. “That was shorter than we thought it was going to be.”
The next mock move, scheduled for May 13, will test the hospital’s command center structure and communications system. The third and final mock move will be a full dress rehearsal where ambulances will actually drive volunteers posing as patients on routes to the hospital.
Harriff said both the old and new hospitals will still house emergency patients and intensive care units, but the entire surgery and delivery units will move to the new location.
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