Ocean Medical Center Reaches Milestone
BRICK, N.J. — In early February, the $82 million Ocean Medical Center expansion project reached a milestone when it finished the final phase of the steel work that supports the structure after breaking ground in April 2012.
The current emergency department was built to accommodate 17,000 visits but treated more than 51,000 patients in 2011. The expansion is a solution to the capacity issue and will more than triple the size of the emergency department, as well as transforms the hospital campus.
The Philadelphia Torcon project team is the construction manager, and WHR Architects, based in Houston, is the architect.
The new facility is a new construction project that will relocate the department and expand capacity to 70,000 people annually. The three-story structure is being built just west of the existing emergency department and includes 49 private patient bays, an eight-bay private area for pediatric patients, designated space for express care patients and a private area for behavioral health patients.
“The master plan was to forecast to 2020 and see how the campus might grow, with an emphasis on flexibility. During the master planning process, it became clear that the emergency department needed to expand to accommodate growing patient volumes that access health care services through the emergency department,” said Charles Griffin, senior principal at WHR.
While the project meets that current need, WHR designed the facility so that the hospital could eventually add two more floors and a mechanical floor to the new addition. As an evidence-based designer, WHR thinks the design will help facilitate the hospital’s goal of moving towards private patient rooms. WHR also incorporated a technology zone on the second floor, to be determined as needs change.
So far, the biggest challenges have been working on a site that still needs to be open 24-7. In fact, the construction team had to create a temporary emergency department entrance, which Griffin described as an “interesting little exercise.”
Michael Armento, vice president for Torcon, agreed that the key challenge to overcome — which applies to every health care project Torcon works on — was completing construction on an existing campus without disrupting the day-to-day function of the hospital. This was especially difficult because of the amount of underground water that the construction team had to deal with when constructing the basement portion.
“The lowest component in the building is about 16 feet into the water table, which meant we had to lower that water table to the tune of 17 or 18 feet in order to work on dry ground,” Armento said. “We had to pump the water out and removed about 16 million gallons of water per month over a four-month period. Luckily, that’s all behind us now.”
Another thing that made this project perhaps different from other ones that WHR has worked on in the past is the client asked the architecture firm to pay special attention to the geriatric population — a significant part of the hospital’s clientele. WHR researched specific lighting and acoustic strategies to accommodate the natural deterioration of patients’ vision and caregivers as they age.
As the project continues, Griffin said that the medical center decided not to pursue LEED certification. The client was determined to pursue sustainable choices, but no focus on LEED specifically.
“WHR practices sustainable design, so the finishes are as sustainable as they can be and the infrastructure systems are designed to be efficient, but the client is not pursuing formal LEED certification. That ties directly to making spending decisions with the finite dollars the health care facility has and making the kind of choices about what’s necessary,” Griffin said. “While the client is not pursuing formal LEED certification, WHR incorporates sustainable design elements into all our projects. The finishes used are low VOC, recyclable materials, and the infrastructure systems are designed to be energy efficient.”
The new facility is scheduled to open in spring 2014.