The Latest New Hospital Design

The medical campus for PPH's "Hospital Of The Future" is turning out to be quite compact. Gone from current plans (for lack of funds) are the Hospital Support Building, the Women's Center, the Outpatient Services Buildings (2), and the Parking Structures (3). Instead, the campus has been reduced to a hospital having a tall 12-story Nursing Tower connected with a two-story Diagnosis & Treatment building, and a separate Central Plant building. Much of the remaining area consist of circulation roads and parking lots.

The Nursing Tower and the D&T building will sit on about 7 acres of land. The Central Plant will sit on about 2 acres. A garden will cover about 2 acres. That is only 11 acres! The two parking lots would cover 10 acres.

This scaled back plan is now projected to cost $$773 million! That is $773,000,000.00

A future hospital expansion tower, if ever built, would sit on about 2 acres of land. On the south end of the site, 6 acres have essentially dropped off the map, presumable for future medical office buildings. That development is distant at best.

PPH exaggerated its land needs, in terms of acreage, during the search for an alternative to the current downtown hospital location! Further PPH over-hyped the "healing environment" concept for the new medical campus:

"The location and spatial allocation of the inpatient units will be predicated by the planning objective of creating a healing environment (patient rooms that have nice views with a connection to nature and landscape). Ideally, the inpatient units should be organized in a series of lower scale structures (3 to 5 floors in height) in order to maintain the connection to landscape and to avoid the image of an imposing institution. Also, if possible, the inpatient units should be located in a sector of the campus that is relatively quiet and removed from the entry/arival areas of service and patients/visitor." Facilities Master Plan of 2004, page 1-21.

http://civics.robroy.cc/PPHMasterFacilityPlan07-2004p300.pdf

It is hard to image a hospital design that more fully fails to meet any of the objectives of the quoted paragraph than PPH's current design for the "Hospital Of The Future"!!!

In a recent meeting, PPH Board member Dr. Alan Larson stated that he felt it would have been "disaster" if PPH had gone forward with an earlier plan to build a 9-story tower at the existing downtown site.