The goal of the new, four-story surgery center at St. Anthony Regional Hospital in Carroll, Iowa, was to provide the community with the convenience of an ambulatory surgery center and the safety and security of a hospital inpatient surgery department.
St. Anthony Regional Hospital, a 99-bed hospital located in Carroll, Iowa, a community of about 12,000 residents, is driven by a commitment to be a regional healthcare leader. This community medical center is no stranger to innovation and creativity. It has completed a number of expansion and remodeling projects over the past 20 years, using forward-thinking, patient-centered, evidence-based design concepts that many similar facilities are only now incorporating.
Just a few of these improvements include:
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Creating all private patient rooms that are identical in the new and the remodeled areas of the hospital with a clear delineation of family, patient, and nursing zones within each room;
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Implementing decentralized nurses' stations with clustered patient rooms;
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Expanding the birthing center into The Birth Place, which has private labor, delivery, recovery, and postpartum concept rooms with equipment concealed in casework and familiar, homelike amenities; and
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Remodeling the intensive care unit from a ward into private rooms with sliding glass doors for visual monitoring.
A family lounge inside the surgery center offers an expansive window wall that provides sweeping views of the Iowa countryside.
St. Anthony is driven to be at the forefront of healthcare in west central Iowa. Adapting its spaces to support these practices has resulted in a showcase healthcare facility that belies its out-of-the way location.
The new surgery center
The surgery center's four operating rooms, plus two shelled-in future rooms, are located in proximity to the post-anesthesia care unit.
St. Anthony's latest project provides the community with a new 120,000-square-foot surgery center designed to serve both inpatients and outpatients without compromise to the level of care for either patient type. The goal of the $28-million, four-story surgery center was to “provide to the community a surgery center that has the convenience of an ambulatory surgery center with the safety and security of a hospital inpatient surgery department,” says Ed Smith, chief financial officer for the hospital. For a hospital of this size, building two separate facilities was not financially feasible.
