Healing taken to a new level

How do you make sure that a hospital is wheelchair-friendly?

If you are the interior architect who designed Mediclinic's Midstream Hospital, in Centurion, near Pretoria, you take a ride in one to make sure.

Midstream Hospital was opened yesterday.

Its doctors will be able to check on medical equipment, such as heart monitors and ventilators, remotely over a secure internet connection.

It's good to be able to monitor a patient even when you're away, paediatric gastroenterologist Anell Meyer said.

All theatres are equipped with cameras so that operations can be filmed and used for teaching doctors, who can also watch in realtime elsewhere in the hospital.

Surgeons can call up patient data on screen during an operation.

To save on energy, windows have been covered in a transparent film that regulates heat exchange, solar geysers have been installed and, to save water, "grey water" is re-used for irrigating the gardens.

Doctors and nurses can forget about walking to a dispensary to collect medicines - they are transported through pneumatic tubes from the pharmacy to the wards.

Hospital manager Ferdi Kotze said that in designing the state-of-the-art hospital Mediclinic took into account lessons learnt from the designing of its other 49 hospitals in South Africa, three in Namibia and 16 in Switzerland.

Doctors gave design suggestions to ensure that patient needs were put first.

Designers thought about the services a critically ill patient would need. They ensured that the emergency entrance, the intensive care unit, a theatre for surgery and the radiology department would all be on the ground floor.

Critically ill patients do not have to be moved in lifts , saving valuable time.

All intensive care units have isolation rooms with air pressure lower than that outside so that airborne germs cannot flow out into the wards.

The entrances and changing rooms for the isolation rooms are separate so that nurses and doctors do not have to walk through a general ICU ward before changing masks or clothing.

It is hoped that these measures will prevent antibiotic-resistant infections spreading between critically ill patients.

The hospital can treat 176 in-patients simultaneously.