Rice Hospital board OKs two projects: acuity-adaptable patient rooms and more mental health beds

WILLMAR - Intensive care services at Rice Memorial Hospital will morph into a different, more versatile model in upcoming months with the development of so-called acuity-adaptable rooms - hospital rooms capable of housing both intensive care patients and general medical and surgical patients.
The hospital’s board of directors gave approval last week to proceed with construction docu ments for the project. The board also approved moving into the construction document phase for adding four rooms to the hospital’s mental health unit to meet growing demand.
Both projects are the result of a facility planning study that was launched last year to identify the most pressing needs for hospital space and opportunities to use existing space more effectively.
The 10 acuity-adaptable rooms will replace the hospital’s traditional stand-alone intensive care unit.
Acuity-adaptable patient rooms are a relatively cutting-edge concept that hospitals are starting to employ, said Wendy Ulferts, chief nursing officer at Rice Hospital.
As hospitals increasingly become places where only the sickest of patients spend time, the overall volume at Rice Hospital has gone down, creating challenges for optimal use of both staffing and physical space.
The intensive care unit has been no exception. It has eight beds and is staffed 24 hours a day by two nurses but has an average daily census of two patients, Ulferts said.
“We’re seeing our inpatient census numbers drop across the board,” she said. “Our goal is to better utilize the space we have… It’s where we need to go in health care. It’s the way to care for patients in the future.”
Moving away from the free-standing model of intensive care will allow for more effective use of staff and patient rooms, she said.
Flexible rooms also can help cut down on the number of times patients need to be transferred from one level of care to another, she said.
Traditionally, intensive care patients were usually moved to a general bed once their condition improved. A patient whose condition became critical might have been moved out of a general medical-surgical bed into the intensive care unit.
With acuity-adaptable rooms, these transfers will no longer be necessary, Ulferts said. “We’ll be able to move that room back and forth from a critical care patient to a general care patient without having to move the patient.”
Eight of the 10 acuity-adaptable rooms will be clustered at one end of the 40-bed general patient wing, with quick access to elevators that lead down to the hospital’s operating rooms and up to the rooftop helipad.
Two more acuity-adaptable rooms are being situated farther down the hall. These two rooms can lend themselves to levels of care that might require close observation, such as patients who are at elevated risk of falling, Ulferts said.
The cost of renovation is estimated at $320,000. Hospital officials anticipate the project will pay for itself within 18 months through operational savings.
Change is also in store for the mental health unit, which will have four rooms added, bringing the hospital’s total of behavioral health beds to 12.
Demand for these beds has always been strong but is intensifying, Ulferts said. At times, patients have to be sent elsewhere because no local beds are available, she said. “Sometimes it’s 72 hours before we can find some of these people a bed.”
The availability of higher-acuity mental health beds is an issue across the state, she said. “It’s a big problem, but we’re going to try to tackle a little bit of it in our community.”
The four new rooms will be added at each end of the existing unit. Upgrades also are planned to the existing rooms to reflect the latest best-practice recommendations in mental health care.
The project cost is estimated at $970,000, with a payback of two years based on increased revenue.
Bids for both the acuity-adaptable rooms and the additional behavioral health rooms are scheduled to be awarded in November. Both projects are already included in this year’s capital budget. Construction is expected to start at the beginning of December. The acuity-adaptable rooms will take about 10 weeks to complete. It will take about four months for the behavioral health project to be completed.