Hospital Projects Prove Complex for Contractors
SALEM, Ohio -- From the outside, the nondescript warehouse a few miles from downtown Salem doesn’t look like it could play much of a role in modern health care. Nor might that seem to be the case from the interior of the building where rows of metal cages fill the space.
Nonetheless, these modules are being constructed and fitted with electrical wiring and fixtures to be transported to the campus of Salem Community Hospital downtown. Under construction there is a new $42.5 million patient bed tower with three stories that will feature 87 private rooms and a two-story parking garage. Expected completion date is sometime early next year.
At the offsite warehouse, electricians with Tri-Area Electric Co., Youngstown, install wiring and fixtures in modules in patient rooms and other parts of the hospital, reports Michael Johnson, project manager for Tri-Area Electric. Those modules include toilet rooms and patient headwalls to be transported to the hospital site and installed in the new tower, he says.
“One of the things making that possible is 3-D modeling or BIM [building information modeling],” he says. “That building is being built first in a computer and literally every piece of conduit, every piece of ductwork, every piece of drywall is built in a computer environment.”
Several area health-care systems are engaged in or have recently completed major expansion projects at local hospitals. Such projects require special considerations for electrical contractors, both in terms of the requirements for the systems being installed and the construction process itself, contractors and hospital officials agree.
“Hospital projects specifically are a lot more complicated,” Johnston acknowledges. “There’s three wiring systems in a hospital as opposed to an office building or a school. The need for redundancy and backup for life safety [and] patient safety is the most important thing.”
When selecting an electrical contractor for a hospital project, finding one familiar with health-care codes and the specialized equipment used in these buildings is important, says Jerry Wheeler, director of plant operations for Salem Community Hospital. As an example, special requirements must be met for medical-imaging devices such as magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography scanners, headwalls, medical gas systems and life-safety codes.
“There are two areas of concern that typically make hospital projects more complex,” he explains. “First, construction workers must adhere to the infection-control risk-assessment requirements, which prevent construction site contaminants from being carried into the rest of the hospital by addressing ventilation and dust containment. Second, the electrical tie-ins must be designed for a building that is open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.”
Wayne Tenant expands. “One of the differences you may find in a hospital versus a commercial-type setting is that you have to provide emergency power for backup of the building, not only for life safety but for critical equipment loads that we might need to maintain.”
Tenant is vice president of support services for Humility of Mary Health Partners, which is constructing a new $100 million patient tower with seven floors at the St. Elizabeth Health Center in Boardman. Phase I of that project is scheduled for completion next April.
“There’s a variety of equipment that’s attached to emergency power that can obviously range from the patient environments and egress lighting and that sort of thing, Tenant says, “as well as emergency outlets for equipment for the patients – also for computer equipment and diagnostic and imaging equipment.”
In some cases, HMHP has two feeds coming into its buildings, “which is really ideal” but not possible at the Boardman site, “so we have to have a little bit greater reliance on emergency power,” Tenant says.
HMHP is adding a substation at the site to support the expanded building. Generators are tested regularly.
Within the rooms is a need for additional power outlets, he adds. On a monitored floor, for example, patient rooms could have monitors, intravenous pumps and ventilators.
“Obviously we have our electronic medical records that are in the patient rooms that have to be plugged in. And then you have the patient amenities, the TVs and that sort of thing,” he continues.
Normal health-care activities need to be maintained while work continues on an addition to a hospital, says Eric Carlson, vice president of Joe Dickey Electric Inc., North Lima.
Joe Dickey Electric is handling the general electrical package at the St. Elizabeth Boardman project and the technology portion of Salem Community’s new tower.
One aspect that needs to be addressed is the stream of visitors entering and leaving a working hospital, so “[we] need to make sure that we’re isolating ourselves from those areas, away from those people, to make sure it’s safe,” Carlson says.
In addition, because contractors are doing work in an active hospital, “we need to make sure that we’re scheduling outages so that we’re not doing unplanned interruptions,” he notes. “We’ve got surgeries that are happening all the time, people that are on life-support systems.”
One reason Joe Dickey Electric works on so many health-care projects is because it is cognizant of the need to ensure patient care is not disrupted.
In March, Jameson Health System in New Castle completed a three-story addition that cost $22 million for its new emergency room and surgical departments at the Jameson Hospital System North Campus.
Such projects present challenges, “especially when it’s tying into an existing hospital,” says Justin Bruce, vice president of Bruce & Merrilees Electric Co., New Castle. Among them is the necessity of meeting infection risk-control standards to ensure that diseases are not transferred across open parts of the hospital.
“Certainly technology continues to drive health care,” he says. Because much of the technology is newer, “you’re kind of learning as you go to a certain degree. It takes a lot more power and communications than we have done in the past in terms of previous hospitals. Which is all good,” he says. “There’s just a bit of a learning curve.”
Also, funding with hospitals usually is “extremely tight,” he observes. “You have to balance what they want and what they can afford. They always want the best but that doesn’t always work within the budget.”
Published by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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