Surgical Oncology Patients Welcomed to New 5th Floor Wilmot ‘Hotel’
This spring the Wilmot Cancer Center opened the final floor of its vertical expansion, a space dedicated to post-surgical oncology patients who typically stay for two to seven days. On paper, this is a 27,000-square-foot light-filled space with 28 private rooms. But the experience of seeing it has the wow factor of a well-appointed hotel.
First, it’s the size of the rooms. There’s no cramped jostling amidst the room’s amenities and visitors—each is roughly 300 square feet with an attached bathroom that’s easily big enough for two. (Shown above is the extra-spacious corner suite.) Windows in every room illuminate the space and offer panoramic views of the surroundings. Fold-out couches—tucked aside with their own lighting and privacy screen so as not to disturb the patient—offer resting places and storage for family and visitors. There is even a table and chairs to accommodate conversations with care providers or visitors. The tasteful bathroom design took patient and visitor feedback to heart, now offering a more home-like vanity around the sink for personal belongings.
The list of comforts and functional features goes on and on, from spacious family waiting rooms and conference areas to a solarium, in-room safes for secure storage, and designated washrooms with showers for visitors to freshen up.
Despite the hotel feel, it is still a post-surgical hospital room where the needs of the cancer patient and the staff were top-of-mind in the design of the new floor. Each room is stocked with all the required post-operative supplies. Rooms also feature a special locked storage unit to keep the necessary medications close-by for quick and easy administration. And when needed, there are two med supply rooms on the floor to minimize any trips for medications and wait times for patients.
The new floor better enables Wilmot staff to manage care while patients are recuperating. Keeping rooms quiet to allow people to rest can mean closed doors that disconnect care providers from their patients. But the new rooms feature sidelight windows with staff-controlled privacy shades allowing nurses to look in on patients without creating a disturbance. Monitoring stations outside the rooms provide vital information on each occupant’s condition. Similar monitors highlighting certain stats are also positioned throughout the hallways for real-time monitoring on the move.
The 5th floor is truly a space designed from the voices of our patients, visitors, and staff. With this new area, all Wilmot cancer services are centralized within the URMC campus, making it easier to navigate and locate patients who were previously treated in Strong Memorial Hospital’s 6-1400 unit. Now surgical oncology patients from urology (prostate, bladder, kidney cancer); GI (colon and pancreatic, for example); throat, head and neck; and orthopaedic (bone sarcomas) have departed the 20-plus semi-private rooms, making way for patients in other units and the admissions-in-waiting from the Emergency Department.
Wilmot is proud to offer some of the finest accommodations to aid in cancer treatment and elevate the patient experience—patient, family, and visitors included. This final addition joins the inpatient units on the 6th and 7th floors that opened in July 2012. With these new spaces, the dominoes have been set in motion to allow for renovations in other portions of Strong, which opened almost 90 years ago in 1925. Each stage of upgrading and enhancements helps also address the continuing challenges of caring for a large population. But UR Medicine remains committed to making the patient experience ever better.
Learn more about UR Medicine’s Wilmot Cancer Center and facility on the URMC web site.
4/23/2014
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