By Joseph Slacian
jslacian@thepaperofwabash.com
WABASH, Ind. – In three weeks, the new Parkview Wabash Hospital will open.
At 6 a.m. Wednesday, June 27, the new hospital, located at 10 John Kissinger Dr. will open and the old facility at 710 N. East St. will close.
The move is taking places in phases, Parkview Wabash President Marilyn Custer-Mitchell told The Paper of Wabash County.
“Many administrative offices will move June 4, and another set of administrative offices will move June 15,” she said. “In between the fourth and the twenty-seventh, when we move patients, there is some other smaller moves. We’re taking some of our kitchen equipment, so we’ll move some of that one day. There are a lot of move dates, if you will, but the big patient move is the twenty-seventh.
“So if a patient walks into the ER at 5:59, we’ll take care of him here. If they walk in at 6, we’ll ask them to please drive to the new facility, assuming they’re not in an emergency situation, then we’ll be taking care of them.”
When the last emergency room and in-patient rooms are moved, all of the patient care areas will be closed.
“We’ll move the last pieces of equipment, then we’ll lock the doors.”
The move will actually begin about 4:30 a.m., Custer-Mitchell said, as some pieces of equipment are scheduled to be moved then.
A part of the move preparation has been coordinating ambulances to help transport patients.
“We’re working with Parkview Ambulance, as well as Wabash City Fire ambulances,” she said. “We’ll just bring a patient down, load them up and take them over and admit them to the new place. We’ll have information for the family. So if the family is here, or the day before even, we can give them information and say your family member is going to be in this room. When you walk into the door, someone will be there to meet you and take you there in the new facility.”
The length of the patient move, obviously, will depend on the number of in-patients at the hospital that morning.
The average daily census is 6 ½ people, Custer-Mitchell noted.
“But we can go anywhere from 19 patients to two or three,” she said. “It just depends. We hope we don’t have a real high census (on moving day), but if we do, we do. The other thing about 6 a.m. is there is typically there’s not many patients in the ER, if any. But, the other morning at 6 a.m., the place was hopping. We just had a lot of patients.
“Again, we’ll just deal with what we deal with.”
Prior to the move day, staff members will be undergoing a lot of training at the new facility.
“We had what we called a communication week,” Custer-Mitchell said. “We have new desk phones … and we got trained on those.
“The clinical staff have a Vocera phone, it’s a smart phone that only works in the building. It’s connected to our electronic records, so they can do some documentation, they can scan things, they can text and contact other people. So, if we need respiratory to come up to the phone for something, we don’t have an emergency but we need them to come up quickly … they contact them, that person gets the text and they go up to the floor.”
There is a lot of new equipment at the new facility as well, and one week will be dedicated to new equipment training.
“A day in the life are the next education weeks,” Custer-Mitchell continued. “That’s where a co-worker will go in at least one day and practice, like a real-life situation. We’ll have a code on the floor, or we’ll have a fire drill, we’ll have tornadoes. But we’ll also have something as simple as, we need to start an IV on this patient. Go find your tubing. Go find your IVs. Simple things like an IV back, now our staff knows where it is. Over there they don’t know and they’re going to have to go looking.
“We do what we call scavenger hunts where you have to go find all these things in your department.”
Another practice week is called the patient experience week.
“We’re just working with staff on how to say things,” Custer-Mitchell said. “We’re walking people where they need to go. How to phrase things if you don’t know where something is. We don’t want staff saying, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know where anything is here.’ We want our staff to make sure our patients are having the best experience possible.”
No training is scheduled for about 10 days before the move. That will allow staff members who would like more time to learn about the new facility a chance to do so.
In between the training sessions and the move, the staff will host a series of tours for the media and the public. In addition, there was an invitation-only open house and an open house for staff members and their families.
The tours will highlight new equipment at the facility, as well as new offerings, such as the new OB department.
One of the pieces is a pneumatic tube system that allows for quick delivery of specimens and other information, made possible through a donation from the Parkview Wabash Foundation.
Another new piece of technology are beds that speak to the patients.
“The bed talks to the patient,” according to Cathy Wolfe, vice president of patient care services at Parkview Wabash. “If a patient starts to move, it tells the patient, ‘Do not move.’ It repeats that several times and then activates the alarm. We have that to help decrease patient falls.
“If you have to have the head of the bed elevated at a certain degree level, if the patient tries to move it either higher or lower, the bed will talk to the patient and say, ‘You’re not authorized to make this command,’ or something along that line.”
The bed also illuminates the floor at night to help when nurses check on the patient. By doing so, the nurse doesn’t have to disturb the patient.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony will likely take place before the actual opening of the hospital.