VENICE, Fla.—Gilbane Building and Sarasota Memorial Health Care System marked a major milestone with the topping out of the Venice Campus Bed Tower expansion. Opening in 2024, the new patient tower will add 102 new private patient rooms to the Venice hospital, with dedicated surgical, cardiac, and orthopedic units and expanded space for clinical and support departments.

“Gilbane is excited to celebrate the on-time topping-out milestone as construction continues to progress towards the planned opening next year,” said Cary Shippert, Vice President, Southeast Director of Healthcare and Science/Technology, Gilbane Building Company. “Utilizing lean and prefabrication initiatives, the project team continues to provide accelerated, on-time delivery of each project. Assisting our client through a phased transition process will help them open their facility quickly to meet the rising demand for health care in southwest Florida.”

Meanwhile, Sarasota Memorial is also moving forward with expanding the Venice Hospital’s Emergency Care Center and surgical division to double capacity in those areas.
“These are critical expansions that will improve access and care for the entire region,” said Sarasota Memorial CEO David Verinder. “The new tower will nearly double the Venice hospital’s capacity, to more than 200 beds and help meet current and future needs in the community.”

Master planned and designed by Flad Architects, the 65-acre Laurel Road campus is designed for future growth, which includes doubling in size to 400 private inpatient suites, 16 surgical suites, and a 50-bed ER without compromising current operations. The SMH Venice project has won numerous design awards and a recent Construction Award of Merit for “Best Projects” from ENR magazine.

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When Rush built the original lab in 2003, it became a leader in simulation training. Over the years, however, the need for the facility had greatly outgrown the space. “Their current space that they use simulation for was well undersized,” said Rich Melone, Reed Construction’s senior project manager working on the new simulation lab. “They were going through very costly measures to constantly rotate the equipment in and out of the small square footage, and they just weren’t very efficient.”

After factoring the need for storage, university affairs Vice President Lois Halstead, figured only about 100 square feet could actually be used for training. The tight squeeze, in addition to the time and personnel needed to move equipment around, strained education efforts to the point that many requests for simulation time had to be denied. A feasibility study determined that moving the lab from the Armour Academic Center to the Kellogg building on the north side of campus would give the space and functionality needed. Construction would then be done in two phases, with Phase I completed by the time classes start on Sept. 15.

Chicago-based Reed Construction, general contractor on the project, is putting the finishing touches on Phase I, which consists of a 7,400-square-foot space that includes four debriefing conference rooms and simulation labs with adjacent control rooms for the emergency department, pediatrics, OR and general patient care. Phase II, totaling about 7,600 square feet, will shortly follow the first phase and includes 10 patient rooms, three more debriefing conference rooms, and additional labs and training rooms.

When both phases are completed, the state-of-the-art facility will offer seven new training environments that simulate real-world patient care settings where students and caregivers can train together. Training sessions will be digitally recorded and projected to an adjoining classroom for others to view, and later participants can review and analyze their performances through a structured debriefing process.

In addition to patient simulators that display lifelike responses to treatment and external stimuli, the new center will incorporate a wet laboratory, where trainees can practice skills like central line insertions or surgical stitches using cadaveric body parts. Another program will allow students and staff to work with live actors posing as patients and family members, strengthening diagnostic and communication skills.

Funding for the new lab came from several sources, including donations, the state of Illinois and the university’s capital improvement funds. While the shiny new lab will be a highlight for the medical center’s education programs, Melone said the journey to build it presented some challenges, mainly with the fact that the new area for the lab had been decommissioned for a many years.

“A lot of items that were assumed to be functional needed to actually be diagnosed and refurbished and/or replaced,” Melone said. “Because most of the existing building automation systems were buried in walls and ceilings that were inaccessible, it was assumed that those were functional items just turned off. We had issues with the HVAC and with the horizontal plumbing lines that sat dormant in ceilings. Everything basically dried out from age and not being used.”

With all construction issues addressed, the extensive changes to the simulation center are poised to provide advanced training in a highly efficient setting.

“Simulation is a safe place to make mistakes,” said the center’s co-director Dr. Michelle Sergel in a press statement. “It’s where we practice unfamiliar techniques and new procedures, address our inefficiencies and learn from our errors so that by the time a team treats your loved one, they know exactly how to get it right.”

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The crown jewel of the project was an emergency critical power system that will support the entire 664-bed, 27-building campus, which covers seven square blocks. The project consolidated separate backup generators, previously stored throughout the campus, into one connected system with most of the infrastructure contained in a new central energy plant. Jake Ring, chief marketing officer at GE energy management, explained the system would drastically improve the reboot time for returning power to the entire campus in the event of an outage.

“In Illinois, it’s mandated that medical facilities have to restore power in the instance of an outage within 10 seconds,” Ring explained.

The new system dropped the delay in restoring power to 8.3 seconds for the entire campus. Although that is a staggeringly fast response to a power outage, it wasn’t fast enough for some systems, like MRI machines and data centers that store electronic medical records (EMR). Ring explained that some sensitive equipment should never be without power, so his company installed uninterruptible power supply systems at these locations, utilizing backup batteries.

Ring explained this need for uninterruptible power supply systems was becoming more prevalent in health care as electronic medical records became more ubiquitous throughout the industry. He said a 10 millisecond power flicker could cause a server to go down, disabling a hospital’s EMR system, which could take hours to get up and running again, meaning the only option is for the power to never go off.

The MRI machines and other sensitive imaging equipment are protected by surge protectors that shield them from damage resulting from lighting strikes and other surges, along with an uninterruptible power supply battery system. This ensures the expensive and important medical equipment will never get too much or too little power, either of which could damage it severely.

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