SPRINGFIELD — Forty years ago, when the operating rooms replaced Monday by Baystate Medical Center were brand new, they were surgeons and a tray of sterile instruments.
“The surgeons would cut you open, they would stand there, find what they needed and sew you up,” said Sheldrick Streete, chief operating officer of Baystate Medical Center and a nurse. “It was surgery.”
Baystate’s 400-square-foot operating rooms of the past will be replaced, starting Monday, with 600-square-foot rooms equipped with the latest technology, up to and including a phone app alerting friends and loved ones – in waiting at the hospital or in Springfield or anywhere with the Internet – to the patient’s progress from pre-op to recovery. It’s a $170 million project that also includes procedure rooms for heart and brain work as well as a new entrance and simplified ways to move seriously ill people around the medical center. when seconds count.
“We have the skills. But you also need the tools and the space to do it,” said Dr. Nicolas Jabbour, chairman of Baystate’s Department of Surgery. “We needed more space, more technology, more integration, more visualization of things.”
More space also means more space for students, residents and doctors in training with the ability to stream video of surgeries to another room if needed.
The project includes:
- 24 operating theaters, four of which are already open, so 20 new ones opened on Monday.
- Eight procedure rooms, including four cardiac catheterization labs that focus on the plumbing of the heart, two electrophysiology labs that focus on the electrical impulses that drive the heart by inserting pacemakers and performing heart ablations which are the destruction of a small amount of heart tissue that causes an abnormal rhythm, and a neurolab focusing on interventions on the brain. These are ready and will go live gradually over the next few weeks, Baystate said.
- Eighty Preparation and Recovery Berries. Of these, 60 are opening now and 20 are pre-existing but will be part of the new unit.
“This reinforces our position as a provider of safe, quality, and state-of-the-art healthcare in Western Massachusetts for a generation,” said Dr. Mark A. Keroack, President and CEO. from Baystate Health.
This is care that has evolved even in recent years, he said.
“In stroke care, we can fish out clots from the circulatory system of the brain,” Keroack said in an interview ahead of a Chamber of Commerce event on Friday.
He thanked all the construction workers and Baystate employees
The project — it doesn’t yet have an official name — continues construction of the $296 million “hospital of the future” project that opened in 2012 with unfinished hull space to accommodate future growth. Baystate said shell space remained and existing operating rooms in the Daly building would be emptied and that space would be reallocated, spokesman Keith O’Connor said.
The new operating rooms and procedure spaces will change the way care is provided for people with common and often life-threatening conditions: stroke, aneurysm and heart attack, said Kerri Ann Tononi, vice president of cardiac, vascular and neurology service lines.
“What it does is it reduces a patient’s wait time, which is really important, isn’t it, when we’re taking care of your heart and your brain,” said Tononi.
In addition to more and larger rooms, these new operating and intervention rooms are physically closer to the emergency department. A new $45 million emergency department opened in the Hospital of the Future in 2012. The Hospital of the Future was Baystate’s new $296 million, 641,000 square foot clinical facility in Springfield. The first phase of the project, completed in October 2011, constructed the entire shell and core of the building, but left much of it unfinished. Over the years, Baystate has built shell space by adding procedure rooms and emergency services for adults and children and other facilities.
Baystate is the only—most comprehensive—Level 1 trauma center in Western Massachusetts.
“We sometimes see a car accident or trauma from an industrial accident,” Jabbour said. “We are only one floor above.”
The new operating rooms and procedure suites are also closer to the hospital’s intensive care unit.
More space and more post-op rooms will also help patient flow through the facility, Jabbour said. Sometimes it’s like an assembly line. If a patient is held up during the process, the hospital as a whole is rescued.
The project also includes a redesign of the hospital entrance with new reception and waiting areas.
Jabbour said it spares patients the sometimes confusing journey through Baystate’s labyrinthine campus.
Each year, some 29,000 patients undergo surgery at Baystate Medical Center, more than any hospital in western Massachusetts.
Streete said Baystate will have a total of 36 operating rooms when the expansion opens.
Rooms are booked Monday through Friday from around 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the evening, Streete said. The rooms are also used at night and on weekends as needed and in the event of an emergency.
Baystate will have 200 employees working in the space.
Baystate said hundreds of construction professionals worked more than 600,000 hours to complete the project. Of these, 62% of the people who built this project live within 15 miles of the hospital, 78% live within 30 miles, and 98% live within 60 miles, said David Brown, vice president, facilities, planning and engineering for Baystate Health.
The new operating and procedure rooms open as Baystate completes its $72 million inpatient behavioral health hospital in Holyoke. This facility opens in August.
Baystate also closed Baystate Mary Lane in Ware in 2021.
Streeter was not with Baystate at the time. But he said hospital facilities are very expensive to operate. It makes sense to invest and create more in Springfield, where they are used, and not invest in facilities that just don’t see the volume.