THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 6, 1996 TAG: 9603050215
SECTION: MILITARY NEWS PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
In two years, the days of military hospital wards, with their lack of privacy and risk of infection, will become a thing of the past at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center.
All the patient care, treatment and examination rooms in the Navy's eight-story acute-care facility, which will be open for business in 1998, are designed to treat just one or two patients at a time.
Rooms will contain ``support systems designed for the critically ill,'' said Cmdr. Ray Swisher, medical construction liaison officer.
``The old-style wards don't reflect a positive feeling about community standards of health care,'' he said.
A new $330 million health care complex will replace the current 15-story hospital building at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center. The hospital, designed in the 1940s, opened in 1960.
The Navy and Centex Bateson, the civilian contractor, held a ``topping off'' ceremony on the acute-care facility's fifth floor Thursday to pour the last bucket of concrete on the steel-reinforced and masonry structure.
``We're right where we should be in the building process,'' said Rear Adm. William R. Rowley, commanding officer of the medical center. ``This project is so big, there's so much to do, and it's been needed for so long, but it won't be completed until December 1997.
``After that, we have to move in specialized medical equipment and computer systems, then teach people how to use them. So we're looking at opening the facility to patients in the winter or spring of 1998.''
The project's groundbreaking was June 4, 1990.
Prototype rooms have been set up to test equipment, and to check over designs and materials to make sure they will work for hospital staff. The rooms have been designed with such amenities as computer outlets for transmitting critical medical information, medical gas rails for administering oxygen and digital imaging machines that can call up X-rays on a computer screen.
While the building is eight stories high, the medical facilities take up only five of those. Sandwiched between the medical floors are three 6-foot-high floors that house the hospital's utilities.
Outpatient care clinics will be located on the first two medical floors, and inpatient rooms will be on the top three medical floors of the facility.
The new building also will contain 26 elevators, compared to eight in the existing hospital.
Rowley said that, at this point, the project is on budget.
One reason for that may be that ``we're looking at a totally new way of doing business,'' he said. ``In the past, contractors and the Navy were often at odds with one another. But, on this project, we're really working together.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
HUY NGUYEN/Staff
Cmdr. Ray Swisher shows visitors a prototype room at the Navy's
acute-care facility, which will replace the 15-story Portsmouth
Naval Medical Center.
by CNB