By JOHN WAYNE FERGUSON The Daily News
Putting the final touches on a new hospital involves much repetition.
Mark Sevier knows that. Late on a Wednesday afternoon, he stuck a gray panel with a room number on the wall between two empty fourth-floor rooms at the University of Texas Medical Branch’s new Jennie Sealy Hospital.
As elevator music played on the overhead loudspeaker, Sevier lined up the panel with another one just parallel to it. A pile of similar panels lay nearby.
“I don’t even try to count,” said Sevier, who works for Innerface Architectural Signage. Every room in the 765,000-square-foot hospital needs a room number and they all needed to be up by Monday.
This week, after four years of construction and more than 2 million man-hours, the medical branch is expected to announce the substantial completion of the new $438 million hospital, meaning the building is ready for occupancy.
“We’re still trying to work out the exact time we’ll be handed the keys,” said Jake Wolf, the medical branch’s capital projects program director, while leading a tour of the new building last week.
The final days of construction are about testing systems and ensuring seemingly small details are squared away. In a 13-story building, the little things can add up to a lot, however. Teams of contractors were going door to door making sure that each one opened and closed properly. In some cases, door frames had to be hammered into submission.
“For me, it’s like landing an airplane in rough weather,” Wolf said of the final work being done. He said he knew he was almost at the end, but every bump made him a little nervous.
The most important parts of the hospital are already installed, including state-of-the-art equipment in the building’s 20 new operating rooms. The highlight of the new surgery floor is the medical branch’s new interoperative MRI. The 2,500-pound machine is connected to one of the operating rooms. Surgeons would use it to check for the remains of a tumor before completing a surgery, Wolf said. Whereas patients in the past need to be closed up and moved to a different area of the hospital to receive a scan, the wall can now be opened and the patient moved only a few feet.
The MRI is one of the points of pride the medical branch has in the new building. Officials emphasized the amount of planning, down to the finest details, that went into the building.
For instance, the hospital’s wings are oriented to allow for views of the Galveston Ship Channel and the Gulf of Mexico, and every patient room was designed to allow a view of the water.
“One of our guiding principles was to have good views out of the building,” Wolf said. “The better the view, the better you feel.”
The design considerations go beyond making patients more comfortable, Wolf said. Nurses and other hospital staff members were consulted about the layout of rooms and other areas. Those consultations influenced things such as the exact height and placement sockets and plugs at the head of patient beds.
On the ICU floor, each room is equipped with a lift to help patients and their caretakers move around.
Design of the patient area also makes things easier on nurses too, Wolf said. Instead of placing a single nurses station on a patient’s floor, computers and printers are now placed in between every two patient rooms. The idea is that nurses will be able to stay closer to their patients while they work.
After substantial completion is declared, the medical branch will begin moving in equipment and furniture, which was being held off-site in 18 semitrailers, Wolf said.
Patients are expected to be moved over from the neighboring John Sealy Hospital — which will undergo its own multimillion dollar renovation starting later this year — on April 9. The time between Monday and the move-in date will be spent assembling furniture and familiarizing the hospital’s staff with their new home.
Wolf also expected that he would be giving more and more tours as the official opening neared.
“People keep saying they can’t wait to see it up close,” he said. “I’ve been at it so long I keep forgetting that no one’s been inside.”
Contact reporter John Wayne Ferguson at 409-683-5226 or john.ferguson@galvnews.com. Follow him on Twitter, @johnwferguson.