Sudbury celebrates one-site hospital

After years of delay, budget overruns and controversy, Sudbury Regional Hospital's one-site facility is finally open to the public. Patients and staff from the hospital's Memorial site were transferred in January and, by the end of March, the one-site facility will welcome patients and staff from the hospital's St. Joseph's site.

The new, one-site hospital boasts 17 state-of-the-art operating rooms, a significantly larger Emergency Department, a new critical care facility, new diagnostic equipment, advanced communication technology and a robotic unit dosing system in the hospital pharmacy.

"We haven't been funded for more beds, but we're fortunate that the Ministry of Health has agreed to fund the Memorial site as a transitional facility for Alternate Level of Care (ALC) patients," said Sudbury Regional's senior vice-president Joe Pilon.

The 136 ALC beds at Memorial will hopefully relieve some of the congestion in the hospital's emergency department, which has until now been clogged with admitted patients waiting on stretchers for acute care beds.

The transition to a one-site facility will largely end the practice of transferring patients for diagnostic tests or care that was only available at another site.
"If we had a cardiac patient at St. Joe's emergency department, for example, we had to transfer him to Memorial," said Pilon. "Now, with the emergency department at the one-site facility, we can move patients a few hundred yards to the critical care unit instead of putting them in an ambulance and transferring them to another site."


Operating rooms

The new operating rooms boast a sophisticated OR integration system with overhead monitors that allows surgeons and pathologists to communicate with each other, look at slides and discuss what they're seeing without picking up a phone. They will also be able to view diagnostic images from the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), and converse with surgeons in other operating rooms if assistance is required. Articulating arms in the ORs will reduce clutter by bringing equipment right to the operating table.

The hospital has also upgraded its diagnostic equipment.

"We have a brand new MRI, two new CT scanners, two new nuclear medicine cameras for general nuclear medicine and two new nuclear medicine cameras for cardiology," said Pilon. "There's also a brand new catheterization lab."

The facility has three towers: the original Laurentian Hospital tower, now referred to as the North Tower, has been freshened up with new furniture. There's also the South Tower, which was completed several years ago but sat unoccupied until now, and the brand new Centre Tower, which houses the ORs, critical care unit and birthing centre.

The new ER is significantly bigger, probably close to twice the size of the ER at St. Joe's, and allows for more privacy, said Pilon. There is also a spacious garage with capacity for six ambulances and direct access to the ER.

"At St. Joe's, we had more of a ward setup where we had stretchers with curtains that we could pull between patients. In the new ER, we have more individual rooms," said Pilon.

Emergency room physicians will be able to call up and review diagnostic images from the hospital's picture archiving system without leaving the patient's side. Some rooms will also be equipped with a negative pressure system to isolate patients with pneumonia or other contagious conditions.
Sudbury Regional's robotic unit dose system in the hospital's pharmacy is one of only three such systems in Ontario, said Pilon.

"It's a large, glassed-in machine that retrieves pills, barcodes them and puts them on a ring in chronological order, so your 8 a.m. medication will be the first drug on the ring and behind that is the one that follows, so it's a state-of-the-art system designed for patient safety."

Ultimately, it will work in conjunction with barcoded patient wristbands and wands that nurses will use to confirm a patient's identity.

"It's fabulous technology and will be a big change for our staff," said Pilon.


Pneumatic tube system

Another big change will be the one-site hospital's pneumatic tube system, which will be used to efficiently move last minute medications, lab orders, specimens and patient charts around the building. The Laurentian site had a pneumatic tube system, but staff at the other two sites had to take the time to hand-deliver items from one location to another.

The only remaining offsite location, not counting the transitional use of the Memorial site for ALC patients, is the hospital's Kirkwood site for mental health patients. The original plan was to have 39 mental health beds at the one-site facility, a significant drop from the 68 beds the hospital had previously. Concerned that the 39 beds at the one-site facility would fall short of the community's needs, the Ministry of Health reviewed the allocation and settled on a total of 60 beds, which required keeping 21 beds at the Kirkwood site.

"Eventually, the goal will be to bring them over here as well," said Pilon.

The one-site facility will be great for physicians who, until now, have had to travel to three sites in the city to see their patients. Instead of driving from site to site, doctors will be able to park and see all of their patients at one location."

The new one-site hospital is sure to help the hospital attract new physicians to Sudbury, said Pilon.

"Between 40 and 50 physicians came up to look at the hospital in the last year. That's not our typical experience. When they see the facility, they're impressed and that helps. If you're a physician, especially if you're a specialist, you want to know that you're going to a facility with all of the latest equipment."

The new Sudbury Regional Hospital has one million square feet of space and has 3,700 employees, not counting 300 physicians and between 500 and 600 volunteers. The total cost of the one-site hospital project was $362 million.


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