The most recent Pebble Workshop, put on by the Center for Health Design and sponsored by Nurture, was held in San Diego, CA, September 23-25, and was titled "The Next Generation of the High Performance Sustainable Building". The discussions focused around how healthcare organizations can design more sustainable facilities while connecting medicine, public health and the built environment. Topics included 24/7 operations, energy and water use, chemical use, infection control and regulatory requirements and how they can pose significant obstacles to implementing sustainability protocols.
Palomar Medical Center, a newly opened 11-story, state-of-the-art facility built in northern San Diego, hosted the workshop, and the group toured the facility on the 24th. The contractor on the build, DPR, was a speaker at the workshop, and discussed how important it was to get their team together with the team from Palomar as early as possible so they could trouble-shoot and "value engineer" as they began to face design challenges and budget issues.
Advanced technology was a big investment for Palomar: they use a patient monitoring device that enables caregivers to monitor their patients from remote locations, and have robotic monitors that can roam the hallways and visit patients so that the physician can have face-time with patients while sitting in their office. They also have gardens tucked throughout the upper levels of the facility for both patients and caregivers to access.
The collection of speakers for the workshop was diverse and inspiring: Robin Guenther from Perkins + Will, Gail Vittori from the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (Robin and Gail spoke about the recently completed second edition of their book, Sustainable Healthcare Architecture), Sunil Shah from Kaiser, Blair Sadler, a Fellow from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Melinda Lokey, from Tenet Health and Mary Ellen Leciejewski from Dignity Health, just to name a few.
Sunil Shah from Kaiser spoke on the last day and talked about the design competition that they held to create an innovative small hospital facility for the future. Perkins + Will was part of the winning team and spoke about how they created their winning design.
Marcia Fisher, a Nurture Area Healthcare Manager, attended the workshop and said, "I'm looking forward to learning more about sustainable architecture for healthcare, so I can better connect our insight-led products to healthier, sustainable environments that enhance healing."
being used at all the built-in nurse stations in the patient wings at the new hospital as well as in a few other areas around the hospital. It was important for the client to find a stool that complied with the ADA; any stool with arms would not fit into the small footprint of the nurse station. The Verge fit that request. Also, its light nature allows it to be easily pushed under the nurse stations if someone leaves it out in the aisle way. In the fast-paced world of nursing, that is extremely important. The durability and the varying heights of the stool also factored into the selection.