Construction companies have many proven best practices and areas of expertise, but none is more impressive than a company’s track record in acute care hospital renovation and construction.
When risks are high and the job involves renovating spaces sometimes only feet away from critically ill patients or ones who have suppressed immune systems, the margin for error is zero. Any construction company building or renovating an acute-care health facility must plan and coordinate meticulous steps to prevent disrupting patient care or endangering the health and safety of patients.
The project
A prime example is Frank L. Blum Construction’s recent three-phase project in Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s operating room instrumental processing units in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Instrument processing is a medical term for washing and sterilizing any utensil used in surgeries and other medical procedures, including medical hammers, scalpels, scissors, and clamps.
“During the medical center’s recent replacement of older instrument-processing equipment with newer equipment, the surrounding work areas had to be updated and renovated with great care to prevent any contamination of the surrounding areas with even so much as one granule of dust,” says Mark Ford, a field engineer for Blum Construction who helped supervise the project. “When we are working on the other side of a wall from an operating room, just one particle of debris ending up in that patient’s lungs could be a life-threatening situation.”
Planning and preparation
Every job and every task in a medical center requires risk assessment, specifically of anything that could compromise a patient’s immune system. Thorough preconstruction planning before starting the job was a must, Ford says.
Blum Construction had to ensure that the facilities’ renovations complied with federal, state, and local laws, regulations and codes; and all construction activities had to comply with current Wake Forest Baptist policy for risk assessment and infection control.
During the planning process, Blum Construction, hospital personnel, and design engineers worked closely together to develop highly detailed design drawings of not only the planned renovations, but of the entire Wake Forest Baptist infrastructure supplying the project area.
