No one really wants to go to the hospital, but when the need arises, you want the experience to be as painless as possible. Two exciting projects underway at Harrison Hospital should go a long way toward making that happen.

The first is a whopping $12 million renovation and expansion that will double the size of Harrison’s cramped emergency room. The second is an open-heart surgery program, being launched in partnership with the University of Washington. Kitsap heart patients and their families will be able to stay in their own community during surgery and post-surgical care, instead of trekking to Seattle or Tacoma for open-heart procedures and lengthy rehabilitation.

Groundbreaking on the ER renovation is set for September, and the project is scheduled for completion in late fall 2003.

You can feel the enthusiasm in the air around Harrison these days.

“I can’t tell you how excited people are here,” says hospital spokeswoman Patti Hart. “When an ER is not run an efficiently as it could, staff burnout is higher. We hope this will be just as pleasant for our staff as our patients.”

The number of ER rooms will jump from 16 to 32. The goal is for patients to walk in, be immediately assessed by a nurse, then placed in a private room, complete with television, telephone, and chairs for family members. A clerk will then come to the patient’s bedside to check them in.

“When you’re sick or injured, you don’t want to sit in a waiting room with a lot of strangers,” says Hart.

Unfortunately, that’s the experience many patients have encountered in the current ER.

“Right now, we have some individual treatment rooms, but there’s a long bank of rooms that are only separated by curtains, and that’s one of the things that makes the experience unpleasant,” says Hart.

“Our existing ER was built for a smaller population, so as our population has increased, it’s not a very nice experience to come to our ER. It’s a very long wait, and our patient satisfaction about that is low. That’s simply unacceptable, and our community deserves more.”

Emergency rooms across the nation are experiencing staggering patient case loads.
“One big reason is that more and more people are using the ER as their primary care,” says Louann Bean, an RN who is the project manager for the ER renovation. “Many people don’t have insurance or can’t get in to see their primary care physician. We’re the safety net for people who can’t get services anywhere else.”

In addition to the larger capacity and cozier, more homelike atmosphere, the emergency department will get four new doctors and additional nursing positions.

This should come as welcome news to patients, but the staff at Harrison is equally delighted.

“We’ve visited ERs around the country to get their best ideas and find out their mistakes,” says Bean. “We really feel like we’re going to have a state-of-the-art ER.”

And it’s not just the physical surroundings that are undergoing a remake. The entire patient-care process has been reviewed with the help of a national consultant, and changes are being made in a variety of departments that affect ER patients – from lab to radiology – to improve efficiency and the quality of each visit.

The contractor for the ER expansion, Seattle-based Sellen, is a specialist in helping clients continue offering service in the midst of construction projects. Obviously, that is a critical concern for an ER department. Architect KMD’s Seattle office also worked, along with Sellen, on Harrison’s highly acclaimed Silverdale campus, a 125,000-square-foot facility that opened in 2000. The Silverdale branch has a 24-hour emergency room but no critical-care unit, and Harrison’s Port Orchard campus is for urgent care only.

“Our EMS system makes the decision as to which ER a patient comes to. Anyone needing critical care automatically comes to our Bremerton facility,” explains Hart.

Hospitals are among architect KMD’s specialties. Its array of former healthcare clients have included Harborview Medical Center, Pacific Presbyterian, Duke Children’s Health Center at Duke University.

Months before the ER opens its shiny new doors, Harrison expects to perform its first open-heart surgery. Under the watchful eye of Dr. Edward Verrier, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at University of Washington School of Medicine, Harrison is developing its own program, which will be a community-based satellite of UW, as is north Seattle’s Northwest Hospital.

“It is our program, and it will be pretty individualized for our community, but they (UW) provide the means and some of the personnel,” says RN Patrick McAndrew. “For us on our own, it would be extremely difficult.”

McAndrew is organizing the open-heart project for Harrison.

“My job entails coordinating all the activities of all the clinical and non-clinical departments [labs, respiratory therapy, pharmacy, rehabilitation, etc.] to make sure we’re all on the same track,” says McAndrew.

Partnering with an existing open-heart facility greatly reduces the number of hoops a hospital must jump through before offering the delicate surgery. Even so, Harrison had to prove that its facility would be adequate and that a need existed – not a difficult task, since there’s no other open-heart facility in Kitsap.

Many of Harrison’s nurses and other support staff will train at UW, and some UW staff will come over to work at Harrison. Dr. Christopher King, who has just finished a fellowship at UW and comes highly praised by Verrier, will move to Kitsap to work as Harrison’s open-heart surgeon.

The hospital will also need more anesthesiologists and nurses. The latter are hard to find in today’s competitive market, but Harrison has one advantage.

“Fortunately, there are a lot of nurses with that kind of experience who now have to commute to Seattle, so we’re tapping into that availability,” says McAndrew.

In addition to open-heart surgery, Harrison will be able to do non-surgical cardiac procedures such as angioplasty and stenting, which it can only do on an emergency basis now, since patients might end up needing surgery.

McAndrew, who has worked with open-heart programs at other hospitals, says Harrison expects to do about 170 surgical procedures the first year, 235 in 2004, and then level off at 250 in 2005.

Where will all the money come from to fund the improvements at Harrison? Savings, investments, donations, and proceeds from last year’s Festival of Trees.

“We’re a non-profit organization,” notes Hart, “so any profit we have gets to go back to the community as services.”.