Designing a 325,000-square-foot integrated behavioral health campus to be both operationally manageable and therapeutic was no small task—but it did require thinking small.
It was breaking that campus down into pieces across inpatient and outpatient as well as psychiatric and addiction treatment programs that made the unbuilt/conceptual design for the King Abdulaziz Medical City Behavioral Health Facility in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so successful.
Put a new healthcare facility smack in the middle of the recession and impending healthcare reform, and what you get is much of what’s captured in the 2015 Healthcare Design Showcase to be published in the September issue of Healthcare Design—projects planned, designed, and built at a time when the market was, if nothing else, in flux.
Women giving birth in their 30s, and on into their 40s, is quickly becoming the new norm in the United States; in fact, the birth rate for women age 35-39 grew more in 2014 than any other age group.
Expectant mothers brought something unexpected to healthcare providers last year: more bundles of joy. It was the first time since the onset of the recession in 2007 that the U.S. fertility rate saw an uptick. And as providers likewise rebound, more and more are starting to free up capital dollars to respond to the women’s and infants market by delivering their own new life—facilities projects.
Healthcare Design has followed the New Parkland Hospital project in Dallas closely over the years, from covering its master planning process and research initiatives to sending editors to tour the site to reaching out to its project team members as sources for industry trend reports.
Here’s a collection of some of the highlights from the Parkland journey, as told here at Healthcare Design.
When the New Parkland Hospital project first got off the ground, its trajectory forward was soon tempered by immediate budget concerns: On day one, it was sitting more than $100 million over budget, largely due to scope creep. The original program was based on a projection of 1.68 million square feet, but the resulting Parkland is 2.1 million square feet.
While the story of the New Parkland Hospital is steeped in planning and design feats, the construction team behind the project brought it to life.
I thought I had a reasonably good grasp on 3-D printing and the effects it may have on healthcare design.
I knew about the possibilities today (printing prosthetics) and in the more distant future (printing organs and bone). I knew that this might likely call for yet another reevaluation of healthcare spaces, especially the OR—perhaps making room for today’s hybrid capabilities as well as tomorrow’s 3-D printing so that newly printed organs might be immediately and seamlessly transplanted to a recipient.
At 2.1 million square feet and an anticipated 30,000 people passing through its doors each day, Dallas County’s New Parkland Hospital, opening Aug. 20, is a monumental achievement in more ways than one.
As part of a campaign to replace or renovate its aging facilities, Shriners for Children Medical Center decided to construct a new 74,800-square-foot healthcare center in Pasadena, Calif., to provide better care to young patients while advancing education and research. The project is scheduled to open in 2017.
Each year the Institute for Patient-Centered Design challenges designers, healthcare stakeholders, and providers to collaborate and submit ideas on how to create better provisions for patients across various healthcare environments. The resulting design projects are thoroughly vetted by experts, reviewed by peers, and filtered down to one submission that’s chosen to be built out to serve as a learning laboratory for future projects—and two iterations of the program are progressing this fall.
Thibodaux Regional Medical Center is making a $73 million investment in the health and wellness of communities in Lafourche, La., and surrounding parishes with a new wellness center that will open in early 2016.
