Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend officially opens at 7 a.m. Aug. 10, but PeaceHealth officials decided to hold an early grand opening this Friday, followed by public tours that evening, Saturday and Sunday. Then they’ll shut the place down and make final preparations for the actual opening two weeks later.
“This really is the public’s only chance to explore the nooks and crannies of the hospital, top to bottom,” PeaceHealth spokeswoman Jenny Ulum said. “The public is going to see much more before we open than after we open because so many areas are off-limits once we have patients admitted.”
Health privacy laws, as well as the practicalities of running a busy regional medical center, mean the public won’t have access to much of the 1.2million-square-foot complex once the hospital opens for business.
Employees and doctors have received about 55,000 hours of orientation and training at the new hospital, and on Sunday the hospital hosted an open house for employees and their families, which was expected to draw about 8,000 people.
The celebration and tours mark the start of a two-week sprint to the opening that caps a seven-year marathon of planning and building the $547.6 million project.
“At this point we are all systems go,” Ulum said. “Everything is on schedule. Everything is being tested. The bugs are being worked out.”
Every system in the hospital has or is undergoing “unprecedented levels of testing,” Ulum said, including phones, computers and nurse-call buttons, to make sure they’re working correctly and that staff members know how to use them.
Last week, for example, officials put the hospital’s elaborate, computerized, 2.2-mile pneumatic tube system through its paces, attempting to overload it to see how it would handle a sudden rush of canisters zipping through the tubes.
The hospital will go into incident command mode Aug. 4, the Monday before the move, and stay that way for two weeks. In incident command mode — more typically used in the event of a disaster or mass casualty situation — a conference room in each hospital will be converted into a command center, staffed 24 hours a day, so developments can be monitored as they happen in and out of the hospital.
“We want to make sure there are no lapses in patient safety,” Ulum said. “It’s a time of more vulnerability. It’s not business as usual. It’s an extraordinary event so it requires extraordinary oversight.”
After the tours are completed this weekend, a 25-person crew from PeaceHealth’s department of environmental services — formerly known as housekeeping — will begin a thorough, systematic cleaning of the entire building.
Known as “terminal cleaning,” the job involves wiping down every surface in the hospital — every wall, every sink, every cupboard — with industrial-strength disinfectant at least three times.
“You just go over the entire area, and focus on high-touch areas — light switches, phones, bed rails,” said Jackie Harris, an environmental services technician.
The operating rooms and sterile processing area — where surgical tools are sterilized — will get an extra two days of cleaning. Once those areas are sterilized, no one will be allowed in unless they’re wearing scrubs, booties and caps.
“We have to know those rooms are totally sterile,”said Alice Wagner, PeaceHealth’s manager of environmental services.
In the days before the move, Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene will stop accepting trauma patients, who instead will be diverted to McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center in Springfield or to Portland hospitals. Smaller hospitals around the region that normally would send trauma patients to Sacred Heart will instead send them to Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.
The actual move day has been planned with military efficiency, coordinated by a military officer, Air National Guard Col. Virginia Schneider, an associate in the architectural and planning firm RTKL Associates.
Each patient who is being moved will have a manifest, and be tracked by the command centers from the time they leave their bed in the University District until they land in their bed at RiverBend.
Sometime on the evening of Aug. 9, top PeaceHealth officials will make the final “go/no-go” decision on whether to proceed with the move the next day. Barring a plane crash, earthquake or other disaster in the middle of the night, the move begins at 7 a.m. Aug. 10.
“If we’re not ready, I’ll make the call to delay” the move, Mel Pyne, CEO of PeaceHealth in Oregon, said. “But we’re not anticipating anything” that would cause a delay.
Up to 300 patients, but more likely around 150 or 160, will be moved from Sacred Heart Medical Center, University District, to RiverBend that day. Doctors will stop scheduling elective surgeries a few days before the move to reduce the number of patients who need to be moved. Hospital officials expect that some patients will choose to delay such surgeries as the opening date draws near.
A fleet of 20 ambulances will move the patients, Ulum said, including four to move infants from the neonatal intensive care unit.
PeaceHealth has hired Life Flight, an Aurora-based air ambulance service that opened a Eugene office in March, to staff the ambulances, along with nurses from Sacred Heart, Ulum said. The hospital doesn’t anticipate having to airlift any patients, but it hired Life Flight because of its expertise in transporting patients, Ulum said.
The plan is to move about 30 patients an hour. Ambulances will leave every six minutes from each of three staging areas at the old hospital and head to one of three receiving areas at the new hospital. It should take about 45 minutes to move a patient from a bed downtown to a bed at RiverBend, Ulum said.
About 100 patients won’t be moved to RiverBend, including patients who are on the verge of being discharged, women in the midst of delivering a child or patients too ill to be moved in the judgment of their doctors