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during this pandemic, he said. This factor will certainly be reflected in the upcoming project.
“There’s going to be good lighting for the staff, staff respite areas and we’ll really try to take care of the people providing the care as well,” he said. “We are sort of in the midst of a burnout epi- demic as well during the COVID epidemic, and we want our facilities to be a place where staff feel proud to work and are able to take care of patients but also take care of themselves.”
“There are time-sensitive drugs,” he explained. “If you come to the emergency depart- ment with a stroke, my goal is to get you tPA — it’s called alteplase — within 60 minutes, and a key step there is getting this CT scan in a timely fashion, so the closer the CT is, when it’s co- located in the department, the quicker you can do those critical-care pathways.”
Another focus of this renovation project is creating a more geriatric-friendly facility. This
Indeed, it is the first hospital within the 13-hos- pital system to receive that accreditation. Other facilities in the system are going to follow suit, Redwood noted.
Another improvement to be included in this project is a larger behavioral-health pod, the need for which has only been exacerbated by two years of pandemic.
The phenomenon has been referred to as the “syndemic” — the COVID-19 pandemic plus a mental-health epidemic. Many of the support structures people have for their mental-health needs are lacking, Redwood explained, calling for improvements in behavioral-health resources.
“We’re going to have a dedicated behavioral health pod,” he said. “The current pod for behav- ioral health has four beds, and, for example, we have pediatric psych warding as a challenge in Massachusetts. We have two patients who have been there for well over a month in the pod,
so those are beds that aren’t turning over, they aren’t readily usable. An expanded behavioral- health pod will be just really beneficial for the community.”
As noted, the price tag for the project is $15.5 million. Dr. Lynnette Watkins, president of Cooley Dickinson Health Care, recently announced
a $1 million gift given by John and Elizabeth Armstrong of Amherst to contribute to the proj- ect. Additional fundraising efforts have been launched in these early stages of the project.
“What’s particularly exciting is that we had a group of individuals that came together to help us get this launched and gave us collectively a
CDH
Continued on page 50
DR. ROBERT REDWOOD
“We are sort of in the midst of a burnout epidemic as well during the COVID epidemic, and we want our facilities to be a place where staff feel proud to work and are able to take care of patients but also take care of themselves.”
includes fea- tures like large hallways, accessible bathrooms, nutrition sta- tions, mobil- ity aids, good acoustics, good signage, and bright lighting.
“These sound like
Space Exploration
It has been firmly established that crowding in emergency departments leads to poor outcomes, which is especially evident from the ED crowd- ing that has been seen across the nation due to COVID-19. This has only emphasized the impor- tance of streamlined processes where medical professionals can move their patient population through their space and get the emergencies diagnosed and stabilized in a rapid fashion, Red- wood said.
no-brainers now, but they’re really not no-brainers,” Red-
wood explained. “You have to build it, you have to design it, elegantly. When patients come into the ED with dementia, they can easily have sen- sory overload, and then have behavioral changes due to sensory overload, so you want to have an environment that supports care for patients with dementia.”
Cooley Dickinson’s Emergency Department has received geriatric emergency department accreditation by the American College of Emer- gency Physicians, making it a pioneer within its larger healthcare system, Mass General Brigham.
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