The University’s Board of Regents approved three major projects on Thursday that will address pressing Health System needs.
All three are strategic investments of capital funds that will improve the experience for our patients and their families, our students and many of our faculty and staff. All of them support our Health System’s strategic plan and priorities.
Here are brief summaries, and links to further information, about all three.
Adult inpatient expansion and service realignment
As anyone who works in our adult inpatient areas can tell you, our beds and operating rooms are full and have been for some time. We have made many efforts in recent years to increase capacity, decrease length of stay and help patients transition to other levels of care more efficiently. The good news is that demand for our excellent care continues to grow.
Now, with today’s approval of a $163 million project, we will embark on an expansion and service realignment of adult inpatient care that will result in 120 new beds, 8 additional operating rooms and an increased focus on destination hospital concepts.
The result will allow us to better meet our patients’ and families’ needs — and those of our faculty and staff – as we serve more patients with high acuity conditions and complex care needs, and serve as a referral hospital for the state and nation. It will help us achieve several of the goals laid out in our strategic plan.
We plan to renovate the former Children’s and Women’s hospital facility, to become the new home for patients with conditions affecting the nervous system. This clinical neuroscience focus will emphasize collaboration and teamwork across several clinical disciplines, including Neurosurgery, Neurology, Otolaryngology, Orthopaedics, Radiology and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation among others. Two upper floors of the building will be used for General Medicine patients. Nearby offices will also be renovated and reorganized.
In University Hospital, we will use the space vacated by the clinical neurosciences to expand and realign various medical and surgical services, emphasizing “hospital within hospital” concepts for other adult patient populations, including cancer, cardiovascular, surgical, internal medicine and other types of patient care.
Until the project is completed at the end of 2014, and even after, we will continue to improve operations to accommodate demand and streamline hospital stays.
You can learn more about this project by reading the press release here. We also invite you to read the Frequently Asked Questions for Faculty & Staff and several supporting fact sheets on the history of adult inpatient care at U-M, our expertise in the clinical neurosciences, and “fast facts” about the new expansion project. Future updates will be provided on the project as it progresses.
Expanding our medical education space
Another project approved today will renovate the Taubman Health Sciences Library building to greatly expand and enhance our space for medical student education.
This $55 million project, which addresses an urgent need for medical education space, will create new facilities for collaborative learning, studying, and computing for learning and assessment, as well as inter-professional education. It will expand clinical skills training space, and support a more integrated model of medical student life.
The project includes a plan to move less-used books and journals from two levels of the building to an off-site location, and make them available when needed. Other library services will remain in the building.
The nature of health and medical library services has changed dramatically in recent years, with the rise of online journals and virtual information services as well as librarians who work directly with faculty, staff and students in their work environment. This change in our health sciences library building will make the best use of crucial space.
You can learn more about this project here and in the library’s blog.
Adding parking capacity on the medical campus
The final project approved by the Regents today will increase staff parking near the main medical campus – an important component of our health system master facility plan for the main medical campus.
The construction of a new parking structure on the east end of Wall Street, just across the river from our main clinical buildings, will help us meet the needs of our faculty and staff while we ensure adequate parking for our growing numbers of patients. The project will provide for a net increase of 500 parking spaces.
A previous project to build this structure was initially approved by the Regents in 2008, but was put on hold because of the possibility of partnering with the City of Ann Arbor on a Fuller Road Station project that would include a parking structure. Now that the Fuller Road project is on hold pending federal funding for a possible railroad station at that location, the Wall Street project has been approved as a high priority.
More details, including a schedule, will be coming soon. To learn more, please read this article.
