St. Peter’s Health Partners on April 17 held an open house to celebrate the new Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Samaritan Hospital.
The new unit doubles the number of Samaritan Hospital’s ICU beds from 12 to 24, offers larger rooms and many new patient amenities, and provides a more comfortable and healing experience for patients and their families.
The new ICU, which is scheduled to begin accepting patients on April 25, was designed to address the needs of patients and provide a setting that enhances the ability of nurses and physicians to provide the highest quality, patient-centered care.
“The most special thing about this space is that it was designed by our staff,” said Norman Dascher Jr., president of Samaritan Hospital and St. Mary’s Hospital. “This unit is a direct reflection of our staff, their input, and their vision as to what we need to provide the best care we can for our patients. This new unit is what our patients deserve, and what our staff deserves.”
At 41,000 square feet, the new ICU is nearly 10 times larger than the hospital’s previous ICU built in 1972. The size of individual rooms in the new ICU ranges from 290 to 400 square feet, and are much more spacious than the previous unit’s 120-square-foot rooms. Rooms in the new ICU also feature advanced bedside monitoring equipment, and provide physicians with the ability to remotely monitor the conditions of their patients.
“This new ICU was planned with our patients and our nurses in mind,” said Vance Marsett, RN, nurse manager of critical care for SPHP’s Acute Care Troy division. “We designed this unit so the practice of nursing will return to the bedside, and away from the nurse’s station.
Additionally, the new ICU features three medication rooms, as well as a state-of-the-art cardiac monitoring room that provides technical staff the ability to monitor, in real-time, the cardiac data of nearly all hospital inpatients.
The new ICU is located in Samaritan Hospital’s new five-story Heinrich Medicus Pavilion, the centerpiece of SPHP’s $99 million Troy Master Facilities Plan (MFP). Over the next several months, the pavilion will open other new units, including a progressive care unit and private medical/surgical inpatient rooms.
A strategic redevelopment project, the MFP was designed to transform health care in Troy, Rensselaer County, and the surrounding communities. The comprehensive plan includes the construction, renovation, and modernization of facilities in Troy, and the transition of Samaritan to the sole provider of inpatient acute care hospital services in Troy, as well as the transition of St. Mary’s to an outpatient campus.
Many of the plan’s major components have been completed, including: a new 570-car parking garage at the Samaritan campus; the relocation and opening of the Samaritan Hospital School of Nursing at St. Mary’s; the new St. Mary’s Hospital Hildegard Medicus Cancer Center; the new Women’s Imaging Center at St. Mary’s Hospital; and the new Samaritan Hospital Emergency Department.
The Heinrich Medicus Pavilion, for which SPHP broke ground in November 2015, is expected to be completed this summer.
