Wisconsin safety-driven hospital under construction

The facility seeks to reduce patient harm through standardization, air filtration, noise reduction and a culture of safety.

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. June 28, 2004.

What if physicians could design a hospital from the ground up using patient safety as the guiding principle? Well, then they would be duplicating the experience of West Bend, Wis., internist and primary care physician Robert Gibson, MD, who served on the committee that developed the new St. Joseph's Community Hospital being built in his hometown.

Although the $55 million, 80-bed replacement hospital -- located on the outskirts of the outskirts of Milwaukee -- will not be finished until May 2005 and won't open until August of that year, it is already attracting international attention because of how it was designed. The objective was to design a facility that would minimize medical errors and infection, and then create processes that would take advantage of the design.

Hospital officials and employees scoured medical research for data on how to design the safest possible hospital. On issues where no literature existed, they put their heads together to decide the best course.

"Some of it we found in the material, and some of it just made sense," Dr. Gibson said. "We're hoping we will create new reports and new findings."

Among these concepts was to build 55 identical single-patient rooms where everything is located in exactly the same place in every room, to use high-efficiency particulate air filtering and to do everything possible to eliminate noise.

"We may find that none of this will have an impact, but my gut says it will," St. Joseph's chief operating officer Barbara Knutzen, RN, said at a program sponsored by the Chicago Health Executive Forum in May.