BY JANIS QUINN

The new $53 million, 266,563-square-foot University Hospital opened on October 19, completing the hospital building plan that has replaced all outdated hospital facilities on the Medical Center campus.

University Hospital has an entrance once again.

The new 256-bed flagship University Hospital, which opened this month, provides a new front door for the clinical services of the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMC).

When the original UMC complex opened in Jackson in 1955 — the four-year medical school and the first University Hospital — the hospital's entrance was well-defined and served as the way in to most campus visitors.

But in more recent years, one construction project after the other obscured the entry. And during the construction of the new hospital, it was closed entirely.

Now the new hospital welcomes visitors with an arched glass-covered entryway into a skylit two-story atrium.

"The hospital gives us a new boost in fulfilling our mission to train Mississippi's future health professionals," said Dr. Will Ferniany, associate vice chancellor for health systems and chief executive officer of University Hospitals and Clinics. From spacious private rooms with abundant natural light to comfortable and welcoming public areas, the new hospital "will help us attract the best people who can teach the best care in state-of-the-art facilities," he said.

Some of the hospital's special features include a completely self-contained day surgery center, an interfaith chapel and a sterile processing department that doubles the space of the old unit.

Patient floors — two through five — are designed to form a V-shape. The center triangular space holds nursing stations, conference rooms, and ample space for teaching. Floors six and seven have been shelled in for future use.

Each floor has two 32-bed units. The rooms have everything patients have come to expect in a modern hospital — windows, plenty of room for families to visit, private bathrooms with tub and shower. (Some showers on each floor are wheelchair accessible.) Each floor also has four isolation rooms and suites for patients who want larger accommodations.

Even though the hospital has no special care units, each floor of the hospital connects to the adjacent Wallace Conerly Hospital for Critical Care, with five different types of specialized and intensive care units.

Patients scheduled for outpatient surgery check into the unit that is on the mezzanine level of the atrium just inside the front entrance. The unit includes six operating suites and recovery areas. Patients, who will receive pagers when they check in, stay in the same location from check-in to check-out.

Dr. Chris Kinard, medical director, said the new unit allows for maximum patient convenience as well as the training of surgery residents in the most modern ambulatory setting possible.

Formerly the surgeons at the Medical Center routinely scheduled outpatient surgery, but it was all done in the same OR suites designed for complex surgical procedures for patients who needed extended recovery time in the hospital. Outpatients had to report to one area of the hospital for check-in, go to the OR for surgery, then to the recovery area, and then back to the admissions area for check-out. Having separate operating suites for inpatient and outpatient surgery is better for patients and more cost efficient, Kinard said.

Directly across the atrium from the day surgery center on the mezzanine level is the hospital's interfaith chapel. The stained glass windows, designed by Andy Young and Rob Cooper of Pearl River Glass Studio of Jackson, are visible from the ground level of the atrium.

The chapel was funded with private donations and through the fundraising efforts of the UMC Alliance, a Medical Center support group. It can seat up to 80 with movable chapel seats and can serve as a worship space or a place for quiet meditation and prayer. Fletcher Cox of Cox Woodwork did all the wood carving and structure, including the frames for the windows.

The completion of the new University Hospital is the culmination of a $350 million expansion program, the largest in the history of higher education in Mississippi, and is the final piece in the gradual replacement of outdated hospital facilities. Now, the oldest hospital beds in use on campus are in the Blair E. Batson Hospital for Children, completed in 1997. A two-story pediatric surgical suite was added to that hospital in 2004. In 1999, all obstetrics/gynecology and newborn beds moved to the new Winfred L. Wiser Hospital for Women and Infants, and in 2001, all the hospital's intensive care units, including the bone marrow transplant unit, occupied new quarters in the Conerly Hospital for Critical Care.

The old University Hospital, still structurally sound, will serve a critical need in providing space for auxiliary services, many of which did not exist when it was designed in the early 1950s.

Dr. Dan Jones, the Medical Center's vice chancellor for health affairs, said the Medical Center's vision should be shaped not by the limitation of its resources but by community needs. He sees the University Medical Center as playing a direct role in improving the health status of Mississippians through education, service and research.

Success in that mission is inextricably bound with the clinical programs, for which the new hospital is the new "front door."





ie.
November 2006