On Tuesday, Northeast Georgia Medical Center Gainesville ran a “Day in the Life” simulation in anticipation of their new Green Tower opening in February.
The simulation included emergency scenarios to help the staff get acquainted to the new technology and layout of the roughly $538-million, 927,000-square-foot project which comes over two years later after they broke ground in 2022.
One scenario was decontamination of a “patient” exposed to chemicals, and another was a woman giving birth. Throughout the day, the patients were being moved from room to room for practice in the roughly 150-bed facility.
“It's a good way for us to get more and more familiar with where things are, where placements go, traffic flow, and identify potential problems that we didn't necessarily think of,” director of trauma and acute care surgery Dr. W. Matthew Vassy said.
Vassy added this is not the first or the last practice run, but with each one they will continue to get more complex ahead of the grand opening.
A big advantage of the new emergency room on the base floor of the tower? Decreased time for the patient to get into a room. The trauma center is outfitted with garage doors for ambulances to park and a helipad on the roof.
Vassy estimated that this could save minutes per patient due to the garage doors and 10 to 15 minutes per patient because of the helipad.
Stuart Downs, assistant chief nurse executive, was on the second floor and said that the new tower features the latest in health technology.
“With this new tower came all new equipment, the latest and greatest state of the art equipment,” Downs said, “All the beds in the new tower are brand new beds.”
Downs also added that the “Day in the Life” allowed the health care workers to ease their anxiety before opening up fully.
“We’re ready,” Downs said.
The tower is currently mostly geared toward emergency operations and cardiovascular care.
Director of interventional cardiology and cardiac catheterization labs Dr. Glen Henry said that the new tower is a “complete upgrade.”
“Obviously a complete upgrade from what is standard operating equipment to what is state of the art operating equipment,” Henry said. “So we can do just about any procedure here that can be done anywhere in the world right now, based on what we have here.”
Downs added that the purpose of the exercises was for patient safety. What may seem like another day can quickly change when transporting patients in unfamiliar territory.
“They're simulating this exercise right now so that we can make sure one, what's the travel path, so that we know we're practicing that in advance … two, we want to make sure all the technology is working,” Downs said.
The tower is set to open Feb. 8.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2025/1/1282188/ngmc-gainesville-holds-practice-run-green-tower-ahead-of-opening