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Trinity construction on pace

New facility will be state of art

Photo by Jill Schramm/MDN A 600,000-square-foot hospital under construction in southwest Minot will provide Trinity Health with a new state-of-the-art facility. This view of the west side of the hospital shows the platform and ambulance bay, at left, that connect with the emergency department.

Construction on Trinity Health’s $500 million medical campus in southwest Minot is on track to open in the spring of 2023, according to hospital officials.

Construction should finish by the end of the year, enabling Trinity to begin the move-in process.

The six-story hospital will have 148 private inpatient and intensive care rooms, with private bathrooms for each patient room. The adjacent six-story clinic and medical office building will accommodate many of the physician services now at Trinity’s other locations, although behavioral health will remain downtown at St. Joseph’s, certain therapy services will be available in Health Center West and Medical Arts will continue to provide clinic services. Trinity also plans to maintain other locations in the community.

Trinity officials have indicated the hospital will need to increase staffing once the new medical complex opens. Several hundred employees will be transferring to the new state-of the-art facility.

The hospital is being built with a front house/back house concept that keeps public areas separate from staff and patient care areas. Each side has its own elevators and access routes.

The new hospital will be roughly three times the size of the current downtown hospital at around 600,000 square feet. The clinical building is about an additional 200,000 square feet.

“This is going to transform how healthcare is delivered in northwest North Dakota,” said Randy Schwan, vice president of mission integration at Trinity. “The facility that we’re in today is 100 years old. We’re celebrating our centennial this year. And so, healthcare has changed a great deal in the last 100 years. How we deliver care and the technology we use to deliver care, all of that is going to be just fast forwarded to the future here in a few short months. So it is very exciting – the potential we’re going be able to offer our community with more services and better technology, and our workforce, how they can deliver the care more efficiently with the room that they need and they deserve.

“We were able to take advantage of a lot of modern thinking in terms of how healthcare is delivered,” he added. “So where we have this ER, and where we have operating rooms and where we have radiology and lab, all of that fits together in very planned and designed ways to maximize flow.  So we get more people through quicker, so the staff don’t have to walk as far, and it’s just using state-of-the-art technology. And the colors and the design of everything from furniture to walls was considered, and how can we deliver the best care to our region. So there’s nothing left by accident here. It’s been a very fun process to be part of. We have a lot of input from our staff to get to where we are today. And going forward, everybody’s just really excited to be here.”

Schwan said the downtown hospital built 100 years ago has been expanded and renovated to keep up with changes in healthcare, but the old infrastructure is becoming difficult to remodel and Trinity is running out of room.

“It’s very difficult to support the level of patient care that we offer here at Trinity Health,” Schwan said. “That’s why this facility is needed. It’s going to be a remarkable support for this region. We are a tertiary care center. We see patients throughout the whole northwest, north central and western North Dakota. We get a lot of referrals from our partners across the state, and you’re finally going to be able to come into a building that is designed for the care that we are giving instead of medicine that was designed for the turn of the century.”

An example of facility design to meet the needs of modern medical care is the second-story emergency room under construction, which Trinity officials showed off at a media tour on March 4. The emergency department will increase in size from 13 treatment bays to 24.

Ambulances will have a separate entrance from 37th Avenue that takes them up a heated ramp to an ambulance bay capable of accommodating up to six ambulances. Each of two bay doors will have electronic indicators that tell ambulance drivers where to pull up and that automatically open doors to allow the ambulances to enter for delivery of patients into the emergency area. It also provides a decontamination area for patients who require that step.

The helicopter pad also is located so patients can be hustled down a nonpublic hallway, directly to the ER.

Private vehicles can pull up the ramp to drop off patients at a climate-controlled emergency entrance. Parking is available at the top of the ramp or underneath, with stairs and an elevator to take people back up to the emergency department.

The facility also has 213 underground parking spaces for medical staff as well as above-ground parking. Both the hospital and clinical building have canopied drop-off entrances.

Upon entering the main hospital entrance, a visitor is greeted by a front-desk attendant in the atrium, which features a chapel, gift shop, coffee shop, and cafeteria. The new hospital will also have an escalator to take visitors from the first floor to the second floor. The second floor will house pre-op and post-op surgery, radiology, and the emergency department.

Efficiency is just part of the plan behind the facility design.

“The design of the facility adds to the level of safety,” Schwan said.

For instance, inpatient rooms are designed to be exactly alike in layout, creating a familiarity that adds to both efficiency and safety. Caregivers always enter to the right of patients, and colors marked on the floor identify family member zones when personnel are present to provide care.

Dave Kohlman, vice president of facilities at Trinity, said patient rooms will take care to a new level.

“They are truly beautifully designed, and designed around the patient,” he said. 

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