HEALTHCARE FOCUS


NEW YORK’S HEALTH KICK


WSP’s New York teams have been helping to develop the citywide facilities of the North Shore Long Island Jewish health system for many years. At the Long Island Jewish Medical Centre, WSP Cantor Seinuk provided structural design for the largest expansion in its history, the Inpatient Tower, including the Zuckerberg Pavilion and the Katz Women’s Hospital. Each floor of the $300m, 300,000ft2


building,


completed in December, is as long as a football field. WSP Flack + Kurtz has designed the building services for two other projects under construction – the Zucker Hillside Hospital, the first new in-patient psychiatric hospital in the tri-state area for over 50 years, and the Cohen Children’s Hospital.


THE CLIENTWAS DELIGHTED


WITH OUR SOLUTION. Silvian Marcus, Chairman, WSP Cantor Seinuk


“The Katz Women’s Hospital is an elliptical shape, 10 storeys high. Our challenge was to design the structure so that four floors could be added in the future, without disrupting the activity of the hospital. That’s very unusual, but we managed it by creating particular spaces throughout the building that could be converted into construction areas and proportioning the columns and foundations to take the total weight.


WSP Cantor Seinuk was not initially the structural engineer. Another firm had carried out the design, but when it came to the construction bids, the foundations came in $5m over- budget. One of the fellows on the Board of Trustees called me and asked if we could come up with a more efficient solution. I was surprised to see that the entire foundation design was on caissons, very large concrete piles with a diameter of about 1m. It’s not a super-tall building, and the soil is a very good sand, so I said we could use spread footings instead. The cost came in $6m lower and the client was delighted. They asked us to re-engineer the entire building.”


LEAN DESIGN: HOW TO KEEP THE BLOOD FLOWING


“Healthcare is a continuously changing environment, and hospitals are always competing with each other to offer the latest technologies. Over the last few years, there has been a big movement to make hospitals more like hotels, offering comfort levels and amenities that other hospitals don’t. One of the challenges for designers is to be able to integrate all of those technologies in a design that’s conducive to hospitality.


Another big challenge is the management of materials throughout the hospital. It’s about how equipment, medication, specimens, food and supplies get in and out and around – the real bloodstream of the hospital. This is crucial, because the hospital can’t operate without it, a key factor leading to satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a design.


YOU GET A SPECIAL FEELING


ON A HEALTHCARE FACILITY. Murray Bod, Vice President, WSP Flack + Kurtz


“Healthcare projects are very special. There are stringent codes focused on infection control and the redundancy of systems and services which are always at the forefront of our minds, along with creating energy-efficient, sustainable designs. Then there are requirements that are important to the people who own and run the facility on how it responds to patients and their families.


Our client at the Cohen Children’s Hospital wanted it to be a child-friendly place that would be comfortable for parents too. There are video games and LED displays in many of the bedrooms, and additional outlets for parents to plug in their laptops, so that everyone feels like they’re in their own den. It is our privilege to help them realise all of these cool ideas – our systems have to adapt. You get a very special feeling when you’ve been an integral and important part of a healthcare facility. When you walk into a hospital, you don’t want to see or hear the air conditioning, you just want to feel comfortable and everything to be working properly. If we’ve done our job right, you won’t even know we’ve been there.”


BY JEFFREY P DRUCKER AIA


Vice President, Array Architects - Healthcare Facilities Solutions


We’ve been working on what is called “lean design”, thinking about these things right at the start of the project. Designers, clinicians, administrators come together with the materials management team and suppliers. Depending on the size of the project, we might have two days or two weeks of intensive meetings to decide how materials will flow through the building, from the number of loading bays to the layout of corridors and storage areas.


We also carry out post-occupancy walk-throughs after a building is complete and we ask the staff what works well and what could have been better. This is something that our firm really embraces, because it does so much good for our healthcare clients and their projects.”


SOLUTIONS 09


The Cohen Children’s Hospital

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