Project category: New construction (completed December 2005)

Chief administrator: Linda White, President and CEO, (812) 450-5000

Firms: Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, (314) 754-4097; Hafer & Associates, (812) 422-4187

Design team: Jeff Justice, Project Manager; Matt J. Brockman, Project Electrical Engineer; Ron Steinhart, Project Mechanical Engineer (Hafer & Associates); Brian Smyth, Project Manager; David Buckley, Project Designer; Andy Schwabe, Project Architect (Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, Inc.)

Photography: Jerry Butts Photography

Total building area (sq. ft.): 461,000

Construction cost/sq. ft.: $182

Total construction cost (excluding land): $84,000,000

The 116-bed, full-service, acute care hospital for Deaconess Health System at the Gateway campus is designed to offer expandability and greater work efficiencies.

The new facility, Deaconess Gateway Hospital, is located on a 60-acre site and consists of three buildings totaling roughly 461,000 square feet—a six-story main hospital, a three-story heart facility, and a four-story physicians’ office building—united by a “Main Street” atrium.

Inside the main entrance, a two-story atrium with numerous skylights forms the nexus of the Main Street that unites the buildings. Designed as a streetscape-styled walkway and animated by the theme of “living water,” the space links a gift shop, a conference center, and a street-side café with diagnostic services, the emergency department, and elevators to surgery and the patient floors.

The design allows the hospital to double in size in a cost-effective manner. Departments with the highest projected growth (emergency, surgery, and imaging) are strategically placed to be easily expandable. The hospital will ultimately be able to expand its patient beds from 116 to 300.

The main hospital houses imaging, emergency services, labs, a kitchen, and a pharmacy on the first floor; surgery on the second floor; mechanical operations on the third floor; and patient rooms on floors four through six.

The heart facility features office and diagnostic services on the first floor; two operating rooms, two catheter labs with two rooms designed for future catheter labs, and pre- and postoperation rooms on the second floor; and 24 patient rooms on the third floor. The patient rooms are designed to implement multiacuity care so that patients won’t have to be moved from room to room.

In addition to accommodating future growth, the design optimizes the delivery of healthcare services. Nursing units were carefully laid out after a work-flow analysis to create an environment that allows nurses to spend as much time as possible at the patient’s bedside. Support spaces for medicine and supplies are strategically placed near patient rooms to minimize walking distance. Nurses’ stations have been decentralized so that each station can directly view and serve two patient rooms.

To minimize noise on patient floors, there are no doors into core support spaces from the patient corridors. Staff access support spaces by corridors through and across the core areas.