Life-sized model

Tucked away in the back of some leased space across the street from Renown Regional Medical Center, the hospital has built full-size mockups of the rooms and nursing stations and even part of the hallways it plans in the 10-story tower under construction in downtown Reno.

Little notes are affixed here and there on the walls, the thoughts of nurses, maintenance staff, admissions personnel, therapists and others with suggestions about improving the rooms before they're built.

It's not an inexpensive process. But Newton Chase figures the investment was worth every penny of the $100,000 Renown put into the mock rooms.

"It's cheap," says Chase, Renown's director of facilities and project management. "We've got to build 192 rooms. If you make a mistake in 192 rooms, look at the cost of fixing it."

But there's more than construction planning at work in the mock rooms, says Karen Meskimen, Renown's director of nursing. The health-care organization also hopes the mock-ups provide a tool in changing the hospital's culture.

Nurses, she explains, have been closely involved with planning the rooms in the new tower as Renown seeks to strengthen its focus on how it provides care rather than how it operates the bricks and mortar of a hospital.

And the nurses have had plenty of suggestions about ways to make the new rooms better.

They suggested, for instance, that an outlet for oxygen be located in the lavatory of the new hospital rooms, saving the trouble of bringing a portable tank with a patient.

They asked that plugs and controls in the wall behind the patient beds be moved so that nurses don't need to reach over a patient to make changes.

They asked that drawers in central nursing stations be kept at eye level, and they asked for pull-out shelves in cupboards close to the floor.

And addressing an issue that can annoy nurses dozens of times a day, they've tested several ceiling tracks to find the best one for the curtains that they pull around patients' beds.

"We've lived with bad design," Meskimen says. "We know what we want."

Similar suggestions have come from dozens of Renown employees who've come across the street in the past four months to envision how the new rooms will work. About 150 of them have completed detail surveys to be analyzed by Chase's team.

Not everyone has agreed on every aspect of the rooms. Flooring, for instance, drew a variety of opinions.

Patients and their families, Chase explains, like carpet for the feel of home. Nurses and maintenance crews, who know about everything that can be spilled on the floor of a hospital room, want easy-care vinyl.

One possibility, Chase says, is what he calls "fuzzy vinyl" flooring that looks something like carpet but doesn't absorb spills.

Meskimen notes that the design of some of the rooms also recognizes the growing number of morbidly obese patients treated at hospitals these days.

Those rooms will feature oversized furniture as well as specialized gear to help nurses get obese patients into their beds.

Along with tours of the mock room, Renown also has brought nurses and other staff into the tower itself as construction continues. Chase says that staff members who see what's behind the walls the building's mechanical and electrical systems will have a better understanding of how hospital tower operates.

The 10-story tower, part of a project that also includes a new central utility plant and 1,700-car parking garage on the Renown downtown campus, is scheduled to begin operations in September 2008.

Renown will outfit five of the seven patient-care floors when it moves in, leaving the last two floors uncompleted until they're needed.