World Class Health Facility in Regional Victoria

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02 November 2018

NDY: In the past, residents of regional Victoria had to travel to Melbourne to seek specialist care and world class facilities. This has been addressed with the New Bendigo Hospital development. This hospital brings many of those facilities into the Greater Bendigo area, along with specialised capabilities that address the particular health concerns of people in the region.

The goal of the facility isn’t just to provide a contemporary health space, but to create a health centre that blends art, indigenous culture, lush gardens and a deluge of natural light to provide the people of Regional Victoria with a hospital that reflects the community culture, as well as their health needs.

A SAFE, SUSTAINABLE AND CONNECTED HOSPITAL

Described as a breathtaking building, the team behind the Victoria’s largest regional hospital have combined these ethereal elements with the latest in ICT and Building Information Modelling (BIM) to create a healthcare facility that delivers healing, connectivity and tranquillity in equal measure.

“We set out with an ambitious plan to build Australia’s first world-class Regional Hospital that needed to be self-sufficient in terms of meeting the community’s needs and the requirements of the broader region. It also had to be one of the safest and greenest hospitals in the country. We wanted a hospital that ultimately provided patients and staff with a tranquil environment, one where we separated the busy everyday activity from the inpatient and care facilities within the internal environment,” says the Acting CEO of Bendigo Health, Peter Faulkner.

At a cost of $630 million, the hospital is a fusion of colour, texture, technology, cutting-edge healthcare and patient-centred wellness.

The Bendigo Health Services combined with the new Bendigo Hospital now provide patient health care for approximately 26% of the geographic landmass of the state. This investment has been a significant undertaking to future-proof quality health care delivery.

With new technologies and new treatments available for Bendigo and north west community, patients now can access better healthcare without the arduous travel to the Melbourne metropolitan area. With 372 beds available, the hospital is approximately 60% larger than the previous hospital and services over 25% of the geographic landmass of Victoria.

COMPLEX ENGINEERING FOR GREATER WELLBEING

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“The new Bendigo Hospital, like any major health project, is a complex piece of engineering design full of complex systems and technologies – NDY is incredibly proud of the design work we’ve done for the project, but over and above this, we are really proud of the meaningful difference the project will make to the people of Bendigo – the staff, businesses and patients – as well as the making positive contribution to the health and wellbeing of the local community, said Stuart Fowler, NDY’s CEO.

By focusing on patient-centric solutions, the design for integrating state-of-the-art technology had to ensure the hospital would be prepared to cope with future changes such as high transfer data requirements and the ability to utilise mobile devices, allowing care teams, clinicians as well as patients the mobility to carry out necessary day-to-day activities.

FUTURE-PROOFED, CONTEMPORARY DESIGN

Bendigo Health Executive Director, Information Services & CIO, Bruce Winzar also emphasised the importance of infrastructure design decisions throughout the hospital, such as the clever use of cables and black boxes securing data with a very high reliability factor of 99.99%.

Every design decision considered the entire human lifecycle. In hospitals, most of the patient activity in a hospital occurs bedside. By integrating the electronic medical records with the existing Legacy systems, using the latest unified communications systems and IP network and converging current healthcare systems, the new technology gave staff and patients the ability to interact in a live environment, ultimately providing greatly improved health and well-being outcomes.

CLEVER AUTOMATION SOLUTIONS

The new Bendigo Hospital also features clever building planning such as installing key storerooms, portering and warehouses all located centrally – the clinical staff can simply log a job which is immediately acted upon. Any food, materials, linen and waste are transported without any manual handling, relying instead upon electronic trolley to convoy items from back of house directly to patient bedside.

Director, Health Services at NDY, Keith Davis discussed the use of BIM (building information modelling) as the framework to provide the intelligence on ensuring design integrity, design efficiency and an upside for longer term facilities management.

Creating one of the most energy efficient hospitals nationally, the team at NDY simply focused on the emotional needs of people. The team created a space that made a profound difference to the physical environment –from the use of flowing natural daylight and reduced noise areas to innovative stairs and bridges designed as artistic features.

Michele Morrison, CEO of Exemplar Health describes the hospital as a beautiful building, a tranquil healing space with exceptional interior design incorporating the theme of surrounding valley into various departments – a building the community truly loves.

The new hospital services a quarter of Victoria’s land mass and will assist Bendigo Health to provide the health services expected by the community in the 21st century. The cutting-edge facility is also attracting and retaining the best staff, training the future health workforce for the region, and is supporting other health services as part of an effective regional health system.

KEY COLLABORATIVE TEAM

The Exemplar Health consortium consisted of:

NDY SERVICES

 

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Source:  Norman Disney & Young - www.ndy.com

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