Children’s and Women’s teams prepare for Sunday’s inpatient move down to the minute
Moving is a challenge. You have to pack carefully, call movers for heavy lifting and cancel utilities. It’s all about the details, even if you live in the smallest home. So imagine the level of detail required to move a hospital—with intensive care patients, sophisticated equipment, an IT infrastructure, and everything else—while maintaining operations in both the old facility and the new.
How will we track the moving of parents and newborns? What about patients on ventilators? Who goes first? What about security? What if faculty, staff and volunteers get hungry or tired?
The C.S. Mott Children’s and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital’s move leadership team has it covered in a “Move Playbook” outlining every detail, contact person, patient, security officer and office supply necessary to make each patient’s airplane-themed “trip” safe, expedient and even fun. The inpatient move takes place Sunday, Dec. 4. Outpatient clinics will begin moving on Dec. 4 and will wrap up the next Sunday, Dec. 11.
“We’ve already begun the patient ‘typing,’ where we evaluate patient conditions and needs by level of seriousness to decide what order they’ll move,” says Loree Collett, R.N., BSN, MSBA, associate hospital administrator and operational lead for the children’s and women’s hospital expansion project. “Our nurses will continue doing this every day as we lead up to Sunday’s move. Each day, the leadership team huddles to discuss patient needs and red flags.”
Project Lead Loree Collett during the construction of the new hospital.
The move leadership team includes:
• Collett, the project lead
• Chris Dickenson, M.D., patient move medical director
• Gail Annich, M.D. patient move assistant medical director
• Kathrynn Thompson, patient move nurse coordinator
• Ken Bandy, add-on resource coordinator
• Scott Marquette – command center manager
• Perry Spencer – security officer coordinator
• Mike Krafchak, consultant
• C&W project managers (Jackie Lapinski, Kay Rademacher, Deb Pasko, Sue Smith), MCIT Leadership (Marilyn Lanzon), Capital Equipment (Lois Burg)
Beginning Dec. 1, the family and volunteers team began communicating to families already in the hospital. Led by Alfreda Rooks-Jordan, Kelly Parent and Bill Meeks, the team and its volunteers will inform patients and families what they need to do to prepare, including assigning one family member to arrive early Sunday morning to accompany the patient during the move process.
A fully staffed command center, managed by Scott Marquette, opens the afternoon of Dec. 2 and will track progress, identify issues and communicate with others on the floors and in services throughout UMHS. A process is in place to route calls, as well as a list of Health System contacts for any issue that might arise.
Security for the move, led by Perry Spencer and Marilyn Hollier, will include all security officers, supervisors and around 40 security screeners who will work in shifts to ensure coverage at the current Mott hospital, the new hospital and the patient pathway in between. That pathway will be closed to traffic on Friday afternoon and ready for the moving of equipment that must be transported before patients.
The Move Playbook contains many other details, even the estimated time and distance between move points, to ensure all areas have the same level of support they normally would. The move leadership team meets in the command center early Sunday morning to begin the moving process. Pediatric patients will receive a move-day passport and a backpack as they embark on their journeys. First to move is the new Children’s Emergency Services, which should be open to the public around 7 a.m. on Dec. 4!
For information on parking changes related to the hospital move read the parking update here.
