Creating Safe Patient Environments Through Facility Design

Did You Know?

Bradley Hospital's state-of-the-art inpatient building, opened in 2009 as the centerpiece of a campus-wide modernization project, was selected for a Building of America award as one of New England's most innovative design projects of the year.

At Lifespan's affiliated hospitals, each facility is designed to help to ensure patient safety and promote healing.

Lifespan's hospitals are unique in that the maintenance and modernization of all facilities is supervised and conducted by an in-house department of licensed professional designers, architects, mechanical, electrical, fire protection engineers and project managers. At present, 22 highly trained staff experts work together as a team on each project.

These staff experts are charged with ensuring that all Lifespan's hospital facilities are designed and engineered properly from the initial design phase through to the finished constructed project. Throughout each step of the construction process, the team focuses on a common element: creating safe patient environments.

Improving each of the hospitals' facilities is ongoing throughout the year. Recent projects have included:

• The Jane Brown building on the campus of Rhode Island Hospital has undergone major renovations. In 2009, the central heating, ventilating and air conditioning units of Jane Brown were upgraded and modernized.
• A concurrent project in 2009 at Jane Brown was the renovation and modernization of four floors of an inpatient unit. Construction was accomplished one floor at a time and with occupied functioning floors above and below the on-going renovations. The project was completed in February 2010.
• Sixteen months after breaking ground, Bradley Hospital opened a 44,000-square foot addition in April 2009, significantly increasing patient, visitor and research space at the hospital. The new two-story inpatient addition features sixty private rooms relocated from semi-private rooms in the hospital's 78-year-old main Laufer Building. The rooms feature tamper-proof fixtures and provide patients with increased privacy, while enabling staff to closely monitor and respond to patients. The design also allows the hospital to be more flexible when admitting patients.
• The Bridge Building on the campus of Rhode Island Hospital, which opened in November 2008, provides three new inpatient floors comprising state-of-the-art technology and spacious patient rooms. The fifth floor of the expansion provides thirty-four beds, with ten dedicated to coronary care and six others available to be converted as needed. The sixth and seventh floors contain thirty-eight spacious inpatient rooms.
• All patient rooms on all three floors of the Bridge Building are equipped with ergonomic lifts to help staff to safely assist patients. By using evidence-based design concepts (the recognition that physical environments affect our well-being), the rooms are designed to enable the staff to better treat patients with consistency and efficiency, thus helping to prevent errors.

Patients are welcome to submit questions or concerns relating to patient safety upgrades at any of Lifespan's facilities. Regular updates will be published on this website.