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Winter Park Memorial Hospital Nicholas Pavilion Achieves Construction Milestone

HCO News Staff — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 06:51:29 +0000

By Roxanne Squires

WINTER PARK, Fla. — Brasfield & Gorrie of Birmingham, Ala., announced a major construction milestone as the leaders of Winter Park and Florida Hospital celebrated the topping out of the Winter Park Hospital Nicholas Pavilion. Crews from Brasfield & Gorrie raised a tree over the structure, adorned with Winter Park’s community symbol — peacock feathers.

The $85 million, 160,000-square-foot project allowed the hospital to convert its existing rooms into 140 all-private patients rooms, which will be used for orthopedic care, surgical, and other services, as well as a new lobby all scheduled to open next year.

The new Nicholas Pavilion aims to help the hospital meet the community’s growing needs, considering nearly 30,000 people live in Winter Park, along with thousands more in the surrounding areas. According to the hospital’s website, Florida Hospital is one of the country’s largest not-for-profit healthcare providers with 22 campuses serving communities throughout Florida. Physicians and clinical teams perform nearly 9,500 surgeries each year, with the hospital also recording more than 75,000 outpatient visits and more than 16,000 inpatient admissions annually, according to a statement released to the media.

Winter Park Memorial Hospital Nicholas Pavilion

“Winter Park Memorial Hospital was founded more than 60 years ago with the goal of creating a world-class hospital to serve the community’s health needs close to home,” Jennifer Wandersleben, administrator of Winter Park Memorial Hospital said in a statement. “It is because of the generous support of Tony and Sonja Nicholson, Brasfield & Gorrie and RLF architects, and the dozens of men and women who have been working tirelessly to give Winter Park this stunning Pavilion, that we are one step closer to delivering the expanded health care services that this rapidly growing area needs.”

In total, crews spent more than 40,000 hours working on the Nicholson Pavilion, using 10,000-cubic-yards of concrete, 979-tons of reinforcing steel and 373,000-square-feet of formwork.

“With this milestone made possible by the hard work and dedication of our employees, subcontractors, and partners, we are one step closer to delivering this facility to meet the needs of the community. We are grateful for our longstanding relationship with Florida Hospital and look forward to the completion of this project in 2019,” said Brasfield & Gorrie Vice President and Division Manager Tim Johnson.

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Fans Help Prevent Disease at Rwanda Clinic

In the northern mountainous region of Rwanda, a new health clinic faces a health concern common among African clinics: the spread of disease within the facility.

Architects on the project used design as a tool to help combat the spread of disease by introducing natural ventilation into the facility to kill airborne pathogens associate with tuberculosis, a particularly rampant disease in the region.

The clinic opened at the beginning of the year in partnership with the government, the ministry of health, Partners in Health and the Clinton Foundation.

The six-ward clinic, which is not on the electrical grid and runs on generators, solar and hydroelectric power, is built of masonry and steel, according to officials from Big Ass Fans, the Lexington, Ky.-based manufacturer whose fans are employed at the facility.

The facility design features outdoor walkways, alfresco waiting rooms and large windows strategically placed on opposing walls to help with air circulation.

To assist with natural ventilation, Big Ass Fans were installed to pass the air over UV lights, killing airborne pathogens.

“Using Big Ass Fans allows us to have only one or two fans per ward, running them at speeds low enough that it will not make people feel cold,” said Garret Gantner, project architect with the MASS Group, a firm consisting of students from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, in collaboration Boston-based healthcare non-profit Partners in Health.

The fans operate silently without compromising the volume of air movement, which Gantner said was “the most important factor in preventing disease transmission.”

Seven of the manufacturer’s Isis fans were installed at the clinic to ventilate the space and optimize airflow rates using a low volume of energy.

The fans, which run on hydroelectric power, will be able to run 24 hours a day when the electrical grid is operable to the clinic, providing the optimal number of air turnovers without disrupting the comfort of patients and staff, said officials from the company.

“One added bonus was watching the bewilderment of the site crew as the first fan was being assembled,” said Gantner. “Some people thought we were trying to build a helicopter.”

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$6.3 Million Joint Venture to Build Kuwait Hospitals

MARLTON, N.J. — U.S.-based construction management firm Hill International has been selected by the Kuwait Ministry of Health to provide project and construction management services for a major nationwide hospital expansion program in that country.

KMH plans call for the construction, expansion, and renovation of eight hospitals, according to reports. The cost of the project is slated at U.S. $513 million. Hill is working in partnership with project manager System Development Project Management, based in Kuwait. The value of the three-year contract to the joint venture is U.S. $6.3 million.

“This program is extremely important to the Kuwaiti government,” says Raouf S. Ghali, president of Hill’s project management group international division. “We are proud of the fact that the Ministry is relying heavily on our team to help improve their healthcare infrastructure.”

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Donated Solar Arrays Power Haiti Clinics

Photos courtesy of Robert Freling.

BOUCAN CARRE, Haiti — The Solar Electric Light Fund, an international nonprofit organization that delivers sustainable energy solutions to the developing world, is working to outfit a portion of Haiti’s health clinics with solar power in an effort to create sustainable buildings and lessen environmental impacts.

In collaboration with another global nonprofit, Partners In Health, SELF plans to establish solar systems at five PIH hospitals within the next six to eight months. PIH, based in Boston, Mass., presently operates 12 medical facilities in and around Haiti’s central plateau.

In the remote highlands of Haiti, electricity is a luxury. The majority of buildings operate off the grid in the central plateau region, using gas generators instead to supply power. Largely undamaged by the January 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s central plateau has experienced a rise in demand for healthcare services as Haitians return to their home villages from nearby Port au Prince, where the bulk of the quake damage occurred. The trend has put a strain on the fuel supply of the region’s clinics.

SELF, based in Washington, D.C., has already built solar arrays at three of PIH clinics, including in Boucan Carre, where workers installed a 10-kilowatt solar-diesel hybrid system in September 2009. PIH reports monthly fuel costs at the Boucan Carre clinic have since dropped by 64 percent.

“These systems are going to make the hospitals more sustainable, more reliable and ultimately cheaper to run,” says SELF’s Executive Director Robert Freling. “Solar is more expensive initially, but over time these clinics will actually save money because they won’t have to keep buying diesel fuel month in and month out, year in and year out.

“Solar is also much less vulnerable to disruption,” Freling added. “If you’ve got diesel generators, you have always got to worry about the supply chain of diesel and the difficulty of transporting and paying for the fuel. With solar, that becomes a non-issue.”

A recent gift from photovoltaic panel manufacturer SolarWorld, based in Hillsboro, Ore., will make the installation at the five clinics possible. As part of their “Solar2World” program, the company donated 100 kilowatts in solar panels to the Haiti project.

That donation, along with gifts of five power centers, inverters and controllers from OutBack Power in Arlington, Wash., and a $500,000 grant from the Palo Alto, Calif.,-based environmental advocacy group, 11th Hour Project, will make it possible for SELF to install up to 20-kilowatt solar systems at each of the five hospitals.

Other partners on the project include Trojan Battery Company and Deka Batteries, which are donating energy storage batteries for two clinics.

“For the first phase, we’ll install 100 kilowatts,” Freling says. “We will be looking to do more than that though in the future. The need is tremendous in Haiti. I’d like to install a couple of megawatts in the future – that’s what they need is megawatts upon megawatts of power. There is a huge opportunity to help rebuild the county with solar power.”

Freling expects construction to begin this October on the first of the five clinics. In addition to building the systems, SELF will train employees in the maintenance and operation of the solar arrays.

SELF is currently working in about 20 countries worldwide with an expanded presence in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Our organization is growing, our projects are growing, and the scale of our installations are growing,” Freling says. “We’ve never done single 20-kilowatt installations before, like what we’re doing now with PIH.

“Our mission has also evolved over the years,” he added. “In the past, we were primarily installing solar home lighting systems. Now we are outfitting entire villages, installing solar for everything from water-pumping and irrigation to household electrification and the powering of schools and clinics.”

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$1.8 Billion Hospital Planned in Stockholm

STOCKHOLM — Sweden’s capital city will become home to the country’s largest public-private partnership healthcare project in healthcare with construction of the New Karolinska Solna University Hospital in Solna – a care and research facility that is being funded and operated in a private-public partnership between a Swedish construction and healthcare management firm and a British fund.

The Stockholm County Council Assembly awarded a contract earlier this year to build the NKS Hospital international construction firm Skanska, with offices throughout Sweden. The 3.6 million square-foot hospital will replace the existing Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm.

The $1.8 billion project is being funded through a public-private partnership with Swedish Hospital Partners, a joint venture between Skanska and British investment fund, Innisfree, according to reports. Innisfree utilizes capital from institutional investors based in Sweden, Germany, Canada, Japan, and the United States. SHP’s contract includes financing, building, development, maintenance and operation of the hospital, which will be run by Skanska’s standalone healthcare division.

Construction is scheduled to begin this summer on the project, which took nearly 10 years to plan.

The Stockholm-based architectural firm Tengbom Gruppen designed the facility based on a concept created by sustainable designer,White arkitekture, also of Stockholm.

Plans call for 600 inpatient beds, of which 125 are intensive care units, and 75 are for post-operative care. Also on the blueprints are plans for 100 outpatient beds and a 100-room outpatient hotel. Inpatient wards will be made up of 28 beds each, one on each floor of the care centers, which will be spread out over five buildings. Scheduled to begin operations in 2015, the NKS Hospital campus will also include research structures and a new technology building.

According to reports, SHP will build NKS in six phases, with phase one of the hospital targeted for completion by April 2016, and phase two a year later in 2017 NKS’s technology building is slated for completion in spring of 2014, The outpatient hotel, research labs, and a parking garage will open in April 2016 The NKS campus will be designed to meet ISO 14001 environmental standards, as well as LEED and GreenBuilding certifications.

When completed, NKS will offer services in pediatric care, cancer treatment, cardiovascular disease treatment, neurology and reparative medicine, along with supportive functions in immunology, imaging, and proteomics and genomics.

Officials expect NKS to employ approximately 7,000 people, including 1,000 researchers and students, and serve about 480,000 patients and 65,000 to 100,000 emergency patients per year.

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