St. Joseph Hospital-Orange’s $203 million patient care center is a nod to the hospital’s key market: Hispanics.
“Fifty (percent) to 55% of our community is Hispanic that tends to be larger families, potentially more involved families,” said Alan Garrett, St. Joseph-Orange’s chief operating officer. “So those folks are going to be here as part of the care.”
The new center includes larger patient rooms, day beds for families, spacious waiting areas, brightly colored decor and reflection rooms for prayer.
Hispanics in Mind
The hospital had Hispanics in mind when it designed the center, said Chuck Coryell, the hospital’s director of design and construction.
The center, which is set to take its first patients Oct. 14, started out as a way to meet the state’s earthquake safety law.
It turned into an opportunity for the hospital to accommodate its largest group of users, officials said.
“It is the new front door of St. Joseph Hospital,” Coryell said.
The 248,000-square-foot patient care center is next to the hospital’s older tower.
The four-story building is lined with large glass panels that feature quotes from the founding Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, a Catholic group that runs Orange-based St. Joseph Health System, which also runs St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton and Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.
The center in Orange has 150 beds, 90% of which are in private rooms.
“Patients who are looking around the county,particularly the PPO patients who have a choice of whatever doctor they want to see and whatever hospital they’d like to be admitted to,increasingly are expecting private rooms,” St. Joseph Hospital-Orange Chief Executive Larry Ainsworth said.
The Newport Beach office of St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. was the center’s general contractor. NBBJ, a Seattle architectural firm, designed the facility. About $20 million of the construction cost came from donations.
Patient and staff input was taken into account when the hospital designed and planned the center, Chief Operating Officer Garrett said.
“The hospital’s staff recognized early on that it’s about families, and our service area has very much a sense of community, the populations that we serve,” Coryell said.
Other features include wireless communication systems throughout the building, preserved plants,which aren’t a threat to patients’ immune systems,and multidisciplinary rooms where doctors, nurses and other health professionals can discuss patient care plans.
A healing garden with a fountain is at the center of the building.
“It’s very expensive real estate, but it was important (to have it),” Coryell said of the healing garden. “It’s an area of respite,it’s not for smoking, not for eating lunch, not for cell phone calls. It’s a place for people to go out within the heart of the hospital.”
The center has passed regulatory review. The statewide Office of Hospital Planning and Development worked closely with St. Joseph during the design and building process, according to Coryell.
“Unlike a lot of projects over the years that many people have experienced, (the Office of Hospital Planning and Development) was a partner on this project, so we did not have the traditional delays that sometimes happen,” Coryell said.
St. Joseph’s older building, which was built in the 1960s, is set to be retrofitted and updated.
Several key services, including maternity, are staying there.
It’s already been updated with wireless technology.
About 60% of St. Joseph’s existing 450,000-square-foot campus doesn’t meet state earthquake requirements, Ainsworth said.
The state’s seismic law requires all major care hospitals to remain standing 72 hours after a major earthquake.
Other Projects
St. Joseph-Orange’s center isn’t the only large project on the hospital campus.
Work is under way on a 200,000-square-foot cancer treatment center that will bring together various cancer services that now are spread out.
Plans for that complex call for a seven-story, 131,000-square-foot medical office building for cancer specialists, a 1,083-space parking structure and an 87,000-square-foot cancer treatment center. Both buildings are going up on La Veta Avenue, which crosses the hospital’s campus near the Garden Grove (22) Freeway.
The cancer center project is slated to finish in spring 2008.
