The Good and Bad of a New Hospital Building

The hospital addition that I blogged about last year because of its topping tree is completed and almost ready to open to patients.

Today, the public was invited to tour it.  I have no pictures of the outside because it was drizzling.

(Caution, if you proceed, there are pictures of hospital rooms and related views).

Inside, it was state of the art, which, nowadays, is both good and bad.

The good part:  the emergency department.  This hospital badly needed a good one and the new state of the art ED has negative pressure rooms and intentionally built in privacy.  Also, brand new state of the art patient rooms with lots and lots of windows and natural light.  More on that later.

How about a short tour of the non-emergency area, which is exciting to see when you don't have yourself or a family member inside.

Artwork everywhere (created by local artists). All are designed to be calming and to help promote healing.

An example of a patient room and the large window.

Part of the wall of the meditation room - an electronic wall with soothing (one hopes), changing art.

The bad part:   I'll get to it shortly. 

In this patient room, the old fashioned low-tech whiteboard has been replaced with a screen on which you can watch television (if you have a Netflix account you can even sign into it). You can view videos that will educate you if you have a newly diagnosed condition (and they will know if you've played it), and you can bring up info about your care team and your outcome goals.

Outside your room, this tells the professional about to enter more about you.  What's your preferred language?  Are you a falls risk?  

One of many nurses' stations.  This is  small one.

So, what is there not to like?

Wellllllllll....there are two hospital systems in my immediate home area.  The hospital above is part of one of them.  The other was sold to a new owner in February.  The old owner was hit by a ransomware attack on May 8, before the new owner could totally switch their IT infrastructure and related systems over to their own.

Ooops.  

We who are patients of doctors in that other system are still feeling the aftereffects of the attack, including their continued inability to access electronic records and make new appointments.

So, about all those electronic gadgets I showed you in those photos - we are assured the owners of this hospital system have strong measures in place to keep them up and running.  But, I also know that the weakest part of a security system is its human users, and the attackers get more sophisticated each day.

I was assured that there are backup systems "just in case".  Let's hope.

It was a beautiful building.

I just hope those whiteboards don't have to be pulled out of storage one day.