A Montgomery County, Maryland, hospital is moving, and staff are doing practice runs before the big day that could involve between 100 to 130 patients.
Washington Adventist Hospital will close and continue as Adventist HealthCare White Oak Medical Center, moving all its contents and patients on Aug. 25.
Mission: Move a Hospital. @AdventistHC on 8/25 transfers from Takoma Park to new White Oak Medical Center. @WTOP pic.twitter.com/byNdj2sFOx
— Kristi King (@kingWTOP) August 14, 2019
Hospital staff will implement more than two years of planning, organizing and customizing approaches, which include a scientifically driven process involving 20 ambulances, nurses, technicians and physicians.
Talk about logistics.
Dr. Jim Rost, chief medical officer for both facilities, said the No. 1 priority of all the coordination and collaboration is patient care and safety.
On Wednesday, staff executed practice runs as near to real life as possible. Simulated patient volunteers were checked in, given ID bands, hospital gowns, equipment reflective of what would be with them to care for their specific conditions and files of the person they were representing. Some of the conditions volunteer patients were assigned included pneumonia with sepsis and labor.
Simulated patients were positioned into hospital beds and greeted by nurses responsible for treating them. Then, ambulance crews arriving with stretchers took patients from their rooms to ambulances. After the drive to White Oak, patients were transferred into rooms at the new facility — all under the watchful eye of multiple caregivers, as will happen on the day of the move.
Moving a hospital is fairly rare, and Rost said numbers of consultants and other professionals have been part of the planning process “to really help us think through how to do this the right way, because you only have once chance to get it right.”
Patients are just one part of the move.
Over the past several weeks, transfers have included files, computers, medical equipment, X-rays and everything else involved with running a hospital. Even gift shop snacks and sundries are being moved.
Mission: Move a Hospital. @AdventistHC move 8/25 from Takoma Park to White Oak will protect privacy of medical records.@WTOP pic.twitter.com/X5Pr7Uxfuc
— Kristi King (@kingWTOP) August 14, 2019
Rost said the relocation will allow Washington Adventist Hospital to continue a legacy of care that has been underway in the area for more than 100 years.
“[It] provides us with the opportunity to fulfill our mission and that’s extending God’s care in a state- of-the-art facility in a high-tech, high-touch healing environment that really will allow us to achieve world class outcomes,” he said.
