By: Beth Wallach
Slated to open this summer, the new 90,000-square-foot building, known to staffers as the North Pavilion, will be a 160-bed state-of-the-art facility, handling everything from pneumonia to gall-bladder surgery to artificial hips and knees.
Mercy is part of the Catholic Health Services of Long Island which comprises four other hospitals and three nursing homes as part of its vast system.
The original plan to build a skilled-nursing facility was conceived about 10 years ago, according to Patricia Grant, vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer. At that time there was a shortage of nursing homes in the area, but with assisted-living facilities sprouting up in many Long Island communities, the Board of Trustees of the hospital revisited its mission, concluding that an acute-care facility would better meet the needs of an aging population.
Although many of Mercy's facilities, including the operating suites, have been renovated over the years, patient rooms, for the most part, have not undergone the same kind of extensive renovations. "This will be a state-of-the-art facility with spacious rooms, patient lounges and a beautiful courtyard," said Grant. There will be an atrium, and every unit on every floor will be designed to have sun-lit space. Keeping pace with modern technology, each bedside will be equipped with Internet access and fax connections. The three- and four-bed rooms that exist in the old structure will be a thing of the past, and the new building will have only private and semi-private rooms.
The new wing will also house a dedicated oncology unit, a telemetry unit, an orthopedic spine center and centrally located medication stations. Said Grant, "We just updated all of our operating rooms two years ago, and now we're bringing up our patient care facility to that level."
Martin A. Bieber, the hospital's president and chief executive officer, said the formal conversion process began about a year ago. The Board of Trustees, along with the medical staff leadership, worked with management on a formal business review of the medical center. They looked at clinical services and assessed what the center does well and areas in which they thought it could do better. They evaluated the age of the 50-acre campus, focusing on the building where patients stay.
Based on publicly available data, Bieber said they also looked at the variety of illnesses of the local populace and where people go for care. "We saw a significant amount of patient activity of people going to Manhattan or leaving the area for care," said Bieber. The objective of the business review, he said, was to determine how best to rehabilitate the hospital and provide patients with the facilities they want. "Patients deserve to have appropriate privacy," said Bieber, "and doctors need the space to deliver those services to patients in a dignified manner."
Bieber said that Rockville Centre village officials are pleased with the hospital's decision to convert its new wing to an acute-care facility. If the nursing home plan had been implemented, more staff would have been required, increasing the need for parking and adding to vehicular congestion. Currently there are 323 beds at the hospital. When the acute-care pavilion is complete, 131 of those beds will shift to the new building. The addition of 29 new beds will bring the total amount to 160. It appears likely that administrative and clinical space will occupy the space of the old hospital rooms once they are phased out, but officials are in the process of discussing other possible uses.
When asked about the possibility of renovating existing patient rooms, Bieber said that the price of such a renovation would have been much higher, and that it would have taken years to complete. That also would not have addressed the issue of the need for an acute-care facility overriding that of a new nursing home, because, said Bieber, "Nursing homes now have vacancy rates, and there never used to be, because of the growth in assisted-living facilities."
Nona B. Kupfer, vice president of human resources, public relations and marketing at Mercy, agreed that a renovation would have been far more costly. She said that even with 29 additional beds in the new building, the shift still keeps the medical center well within its licensing capacity.
Mercy's Board of Trustees approved the change at a September 2004 retreat. Bieber said that Catholic Health Services endorsed the plan as well, and the New York State Department of Health approved it a few weeks ago. Kupfer and Grant wholeheartedly agreed with Bieber that the plan for the new facility has been a morale booster for the staff. Grant was particularly pleased that the hospital involved the nursing staff in a grass-roots kind of way, since nurses are on the front lines in assessing patient needs. Said Bieber, "The staff is thrilled to see something so incredibly positive. This [facility] will put Mercy Medical Center right in the forefront."
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