Sutter Roseville opens $178 million ER early to make more room for coronavirus patients
In the past six weeks, as the new coronavirus spread across the Sacramento region, leaders at Sutter Roseville Medical Center moved to open their expanded emergency and critical care units long before the planned May 27 date.
“Late February, when we saw what was happening in the world and thought about how we would be prepared for that — not just Sutter Roseville but all of Sutter Health — one of the many actions was: ‘Joan, get this building open early,’” said Joan Touloukian, the master planning project director at Sutter Roseville. “At the same time, all of our (Sutter Health) leadership was working on: Where do we get more ventilators? How are we managing these patients? Where are we going to put them?”
Touloukian said it was natural that the Sutter Roseville project would become part of that effort. She will see the $178 million project she’s shepherded for about four years open its doors on Tuesday, a month ahead of schedule.
“We were fortunate to have this 95,000-square-foot building just about done outside,” she said, “and ... we have been marching down that path aggressively for the last five or six weeks.”
Sutter Roseville Chief Executive Officer Brian Alexander said he’s glad to open the expansion at a time when his team can support the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by adding a large number of critical care beds.
“When our care teams helped design this expansion, they took into account numerous possible health-crisis scenarios,” Alexander said. “Because of their foresight and planning, Sutter Roseville is prepared to care for patients during this pandemic and other public-health emergencies.”
The emergency room addition, which now sits where a parking lot existed, doubles the number of beds in the hospital’s emergency department to 68. Patients can see the entrance to the old emergency department when they enter the new facility.
At the same time, Sutter Roseville also built another intensive care unit with space for 24 more beds, dramatically ramping up the hospital’s capacity for the sickest patients. Prior to this expansion, the facility had 32 ICU beds.
Keegan Kirby, the clinical manager of the emergency department, said officials plan at least initially to continue to use the former ED space as an area for patients with symptoms that are hallmarks of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus. Patients experience fever, coughing and shortness of breath, and in 20 percent of cases, this can lead to severe respiratory failure that compromises organ function.
What patients can expect
In a tour of the facility, Kirby and Touloukian joined with Dr. Peter Hull, an emergency medicine physician, to highlight key improvements in both the intensive care and emergency units. The warmth of earth tones surround patients from the moment they walk through the door, from the tawny shades of the pendant lights above their heads to the geometric patterns on the seating in the lobby.
A nurse will greet patients at the arrival desk, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Behind that desk, artists Sophia Lacin and Hennessey Christophel have hand-painted a Roseville native blue oak tree, with blue sky and sun filtering through its leaves. The two artists are perhaps best known locally for their Bright Underbelly in Sacramento’s largest farmers market under the W-X Freeway and their 14,000-square-foot Same Sun abstract painting on the city of Davis’ municipal water tank.
Numbered doorways are at the right and left of the arrival desk, each one leading to a spacious triage room where patients can sit in a comfy chair that, with the touch of a remote, converts to an exam table. The patient can continue to sit as it reclines.
If the patient has to go out for diagnostic exams, the glass doors entering into the ER hallways glide together and fold to the side, removing any obstacles to gurneys. For patient privacy, nurses and physicians can pull curtains shut to limit views into the room.
In isolation and ICU rooms, where the medical team may treat patients with infectious diseases, they have dispensed with curtains because they have to be sanitized after each use. Instead, there are blinds between two panes of glass. Nurses can open and close them by turning a small wheel.
The new ICU rooms sit on the second and third floor, just above a portion of the new emergency department, along with two new labs for cardiac catheterization interventions. A third such lab is being built and will include equipment and room to also do neurological and radiological interventions.
Supply rooms and medical transcription rooms are centrally located, ensuring that staff can quickly get back to patients. Hospital personnel worked furiously to get the rooms stocked and ready, and Kirby and other hospital leaders have coordinated orientation for ER staff over the last two weeks.
In case of a mass-casualty event
Back in the lobby, Kirby points out that this big room will be used for patient care in the event of a mass-casualty incident. To make this work, they had the architectural firm HGA and general contractor Rudolph and Sletten design and build into the room connections for oxygen and other gases that would be needed to support patients and procedures. Then they artfully hid them.
“Imagine 50 patients show up for a mass-casualty incident — earthquakes, shooting or something like that,” Kirby said. “We’ve overwhelmed all the beds and triage rooms. Everything’s full with critical patients. We need additional space. One alternative that a lot of health care facilities, including ours, use is we have to set up a tent as an alternative care location. What we thought about doing ... is setting up the lobby .... We’ll turn this into a big care space.”
Emergency room visits have grown to almost 85,000 patients a year, Kirby said, but the prior facility could accommodate only about 60,000 patients on an annual basis, so the expansion was due.
In a news release issued by Sutter Health, State Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, commended the company for making this investment, saying that it strengthens the community’s capacity to promote and protect public health.
“Sutter Roseville Medical Center’s continued investment in our public health infrastructure helps drive our ability to prevent disease, heal after injury or illness, and respond to both chronic health challenges and acute ones like COVID-19,” he said.
This story was originally published April 27, 2020 at 11:19 AM.
