Healthcare Design - August 2021 - 16

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C
ENTRAL STERILE PROCESSING
departments, where surgical
supplies and tools are
cleaned, disinfected, and assembled
onto case carts for
upcoming procedures, are
often relegated to basements
or other non-patient-facing
areas, which aren't always capable of expanding
to accommodate changing operational, equipment,
or storage needs, says Brenda BushMoline,
vice president, buildings, global health
sector leader at Stantec (Chicago).
Over time, these departments get squeezed
and staff end up working in less than ideal conditions,
or facilities seek other spaces to expand,
which can result in central sterile services scattered
across different floors or buildings. " These
spaces are so hard to expand that [staff] wind up
just working with what they have, " says Scott
Huff, principal at Stantec (Philadelphia).
Penn Medicine sought to address these realities
during planning for its new Pavilion, a
1.5 million-square-foot facility opening this
fall across from Hospital of the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (HUP). However,
an entire floor of the new 17-story inpatient
building would be required to meet its
central sterile needs, a fact that inspired the
organization to consider building an off-site
department instead. After realizing that several
of its existing buildings also faced space
constraints, Penn Medicine decided to build a
100,000-square-foot Interventional Support
Center (ISC) that would handle instrument
processing services for multiple locations, including
HUP, three outpatient facilities, and
the future Pavilion. " They believed they could
build better space off campus from all the sites
and build a better process, " says Huff. Stantec
led project management and architecture, interior,
and MEP design for the project.
The new facility opened in February and
is housed in a warehouse space in southwest
Philadelphia. Chris Pastore, managing director
of ISC at Penn Medicine, says it's designed
with a one-way forward flow, whereby used
supplies arrive on case carts and are electronically
scanned for tracking before moving into a
decontamination area comprising 14 three-bay
sinks for ultrasonic cleaning and disinfecting.
Then they're moved into an assembly area with
28 ergonomically designed workstations where
staff place instruments in trays to be sterilized
and used for future cases. The trays are stored
16
AU GUST 2021
TOP: The decontamination
process begins at one of
14 triple-sink stations.
Signage and bright colors
are used to delineate
work areas. MIDDLE: Wire
shelving is used to store
soft goods waiting to be
assembled in clean case
carts. Color is used on
columns to offer visual
interest and wayfinding
cues in the expansive
space. BOTTOM: A
separate administrative
suite provides office
space and employee
amenities, including a
staff lounge, which is
highlighted by a mural
of the Philadelphia
city skyline.
MORE
ONLINE:
For more on the
Interventional Support
Center, including how
Stantec's engineers
used time and motion
studies and simulation
modeling during the
planning process to
eliminate bottlenecks,
visit HCDmagazine.
com/penn-iscplanning.
in
the facility's 20 high-density filing units, which operate like vertical
carousels with each unit dedicated to a hospital and department. Each afternoon,
supplies are gathered for the next day's procedures and assembled
onto case carts, which are staged at a dispatch vestibule for pick-up
by a local transportation company that was contracted to handle aroundthe-clock
movement of supplies between the ISC and each facility.
Pastore says while all the facilities are still required by the state to have
some level of instrument processing on-site, about 80 percent of the
trays that were regularly processed at the hospitals are coming to the new
ISC facility. " By moving our processing operations from the traditional
hospital setting to an off-site, dedicated facility, we're able to increase efficiency
in a high-quality, cost-effective way-all while keeping up with
increasing demand, " he says. -Anne DiNardo, executive editor
HCDMAGAZINE.COM
JEFFREY TOTARO
http://HCDmagazine.com/penn-isc-planning http://HCDmagazine.com/penn-isc-planning http://HCDmagazine.com/penn-isc-planning http://www.HCDMAGAZINE.COM
Healthcare Design - August 2021

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