New Medical Center Serves As National Model of Design, Healing and Wellness
SPRINGFIELD, Ore., Aug. 4 /PRNewswire/ — Set on 181 acres along Oregon’s scenic McKenzie River, Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend blends the best of hospitality and health care design to create a place that promotes healing and wellness and lifts the spirits of patients, visitors and employees. On Aug. 10, 2008, this 1.2 million square foot, $500 million medical center campus will open to the public as an estimated 150 patients are transferred to the new campus from Sacred Heart’s existing hospital in Eugene.
“People who visit Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend often tell us that it looks more like a Northwest lodge than a hospital, and we designed it that way,” explained Jill Hoggard Green, Administrator of Sacred Heart at RiverBend. In fact, the hospital teamed with world-renowned hospitality and health care architects to ensure the new facility offered the best of both worlds, incorporating the clinical needs of a hospital with a calm, relaxing setting to allow for faster healing.
More than 100 former patients and family members also joined doctors, nurses and hospital staff to help mold the design of Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend. In all, 1,200 people served on teams that analyzed approximately 1,000 hospital processes, providing input on creating an environment that not only is patient-centered and efficient, but also greatly decreases the potential for clinical errors.
Sacred Heart will study how many of its new design features are improving care at the RiverBend campus. The hospital will look at rates of medication errors and hospital-acquired infections, along with data on length of stay, patient satisfaction and staff retention to ensure the new hospital is continually improving.
This research is part of Sacred Heart’s commitment to the Pebble Project, an international initiative launched in 2000 to promote evidence-based design in health care facilities. Like evidence-based medicine, evidence-based design relies on research and data to make decisions about building design. The information is then shared among a network of health care partners who incorporate best practices into the design of new health care facilities such as Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend.
ABOUT SACRED HEART MEDICAL CENTER
Sacred Heart Medical Center is one of the largest hospitals between Portland and San Francisco and a regional referral center serving as a Level II trauma center for an eight-county region. Key services for the nonprofit hospital include the Oregon Heart & Vascular Institute, Neurosciences Institute with a Gamma Knife Center, Gerontology Institute, a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and specialized surgical services. Sacred Heart Medical Center has two campuses: RiverBend in Springfield, Oregon, and University District, located in neighboring Eugene, Oregon. For more information, visit the RiverBend online press kit at http://www.peacehealth.org/newsroom.
Sacred Heart Medical Center
CONTACT: Andrea Ash of PeaceHealth Media Relations, Office,+1-541-686-7110, Cell, +1-541-501-3296, aash@peacehealth.org; or Susan PiersonBrown of Seven November Inc., +1-206-409-4693, media@sevennovember.com, bothfor Sacred Heart Medical Center
Web site: http://www.peacehealth.org/newsroomhttp://www.sevennovember.com/