Leaders at Inova Loudoun Hospital cut the ribbon Friday on a 42,000-square-foot space for new children’s and medical units. It’s a $30 million project they hope will make hospital stays feel a bit more like home.
The initiative has been in the works since 2022, and the new sixth floor includes 48 private patient rooms that will also support pediatric care. Thirty-six rooms will be used as medical/surgical beds, and the other 12 will be for pediatric patients, with six additional rooms that could be used as pediatric overflow beds.
Susan Carroll, president of Inova Loudoun Hospital, said during a news conference there are “only two hospitals from here to Richmond that serve pediatric patients” with inpatient units, “hence the reason why we need to continue to grow.”
Cindy Defrancesco, child life specialist at the hospital, said the floor includes “patient safer rooms” for patients who “come in with special needs, and that means the room needs to be altered in a little bit of a way to keep them safe throughout their stay with us.”
Those rooms have covered TVs, different sinks and features in the bathrooms so that “they can still have their own private area to take a shower, but if they were feeling unsafe, they would still be considered safe in that space.”
In the pediatrics section, there’s an activity room with games projected onto the floor and other toys for children to use. The room has “things where the kids can play, if they feel able to, if they can get out of the room, and they can move their bodies and really use some of those,” Defrancesco said.
In the pediatric patient rooms, there are sound machines to help parents put babies to sleep. Those features “are there to make it feel more normal, feel like home,” she said.
The new rooms are also larger and have telehealth technology on the walls to enable doctors to visit patients virtually as needed. Each room has “a family zone, so we do focus on the family as well as the patient being cared for,” said Andrew May, with Inova’s design and construction department.
Bathrooms in the rooms are “outbound bathrooms,” which May said help provide nurses with more visibility into the patient’s rooms.
The units have nursing stations with “pass-through connectivity,” so they can enter and exit from either side.
“We have collaborative areas, as you’ll see in our nurse stations, and we also have our medicine rooms that are tied to our nurse stations, and those flow a little bit more easily,” May said.
The pediatric overflow beds are particularly helpful, May said, because during respiratory virus season, hospital beds sometimes fill up quickly.
“Based on their studies with the numbers of patient populations spiking at certain times of the year, we felt that there was a need to have that overflow that does occur now in our current hospital,” May said.
The medical/surgical unit beds have concealed overhead lifts, and the children’s unit has additional visibility for staff through door windows.
Dr. Steve Narang, president of Inova’s pediatric service line, called the new unit “a commitment to the future.”
The new floor is scheduled to open to patients Jan. 22.
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