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Paoli Hospital’s new state-of-the-art Pavilion puts patients first.
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TV sitcom writers have delighted in the creative possibilities of those shadowy figures lurking behind the curtained dividers between hospital beds. In real life, though, they’re a threat to privacy, leading esteemed organizations like the American Institute of Architects to back a current mandate to replace semi-private rooms with single ones in all new hospital construction. At issue is not only privacy and patient-doctor confidentiality, but everything from staff turnover to patient recovery times.
Enter Paoli Hospital’s new Pavilion, a five-story facility that’s a shining example of a new type of healthcare architecture known as evidence-based design. The idea is to build better hospitals by taking into account factors like natural light and noise level and their impact on patient care, medical errors and infections.
The Pavilion—so named because its three-story atrium lobby resembles a gatehouse or giant tent— includes 124 private patient rooms, a ground-floor emergency department (with its own entrance and corridors) and 12 operating rooms known as OR “suites” because of their spacious size and state-of-the-art amenities.
In all, the 259,000-square-foot addition nearly doubles the size of the hospital. The older section, which retains its former entrance off Lancaster Avenue, now houses only two departments: maternity and outpatient services. A renovated 737-space parking garage is linked to the new addition by covered walkways on two floors.
In the weeks leading up to the Pavilion’s grand opening in June, the new space was described as quiet, light-filled, spacious and easy to navigate. Such adjectives are better suited to a destination hotel than a busy suburban hospital located in a region that’s been dubbed the fastest growing in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
The Pavilion cost $145 million to build and required more than four years of planning and design. So it’s no wonder that it’s considered the most significant milestone in the hospital’s history, short of its relocation from West Chester in 1968. Hospital president Barbara Tachovsky describes it as “visionary thinking” manifested in design. “More and more hospitals are building environments to be safer, more efficient, more accessible, more natural and more supportive of healing,” says Tachovsky. “We’re at the forefront of that movement.”
The project’s architect was Bob Mainwaring of Robert D. Lynn Associates, a Philadelphia firm that specializes in evidence-based hospital design. He describes the plans for Paoli as practical above all else—such as the well-placed sink to encourage hand washing and the small locking cabinets for each patient to avoid medication errors.
Anyone who’s had to endure a night in a so-called semi-private room should understand the value of privacy. But in the Pavilion, it goes deeper than that.
On the three floors devoted to patients, the single rooms resemble private spaces in a sleep clinic. Painted in calming blues and greens, each has an identical layout, with a sink, bed, handrail and bathroom. Architects call this “same-handed” design, and it’s mostly for the hospital’s benefit, increasing efficiency and saving precious time in case of an emergency, when personnel must rush in with equipment.
Consideration is given to both the patient and the family caregiver. The room’s “zones” include an area on one side of the room for storage, nooks for flowers and card displays, and a foldout couch in case someone wants to stay overnight.
Then there are the less obvious features. Gone are those flickering lights over the bed that cast an eerie florescent glow over the patient. And, of course, you won’t see those sturdy gooseneck lamps that were always part of the scenery in old soap operas.
Natural light and the outdoors are major Pavilion selling points. Private rooms that don’t face the woods alongside Lancaster Pike have views of a central courtyard, where visitors and staff can relax among herb gardens and flowering plants. Surgeons and other staff need only to take a few steps from the OR to find a window-lined corridor.
Indeed, hospitals have come a long way since the days “when you had a ward with eight beds side-by-side,” jokes Mainwaring on a recent tour of the new Pavilion and its towering, three-story atrium that serves as both a second entrance to the old section of the hospital and an admissions area for in-patient care.
Mainwaring is joined by Frieda Schmidt, the Paoli Hospital’s longtime public relations rep, who serves as a virtual one-woman docent and tour guide. She’s also the resident expert on the Center of Health Design, the nonprofit advocacy group that’s been the focal point of Paoli’s involvement with evidence- based design. The California group developed many of its concepts to address what’s known as “best practices” in healthcare—those that reduce the likelihood of medical errors, infections and falls, for instance.
