A Banner Year for Hospitals
Banner Health injects vigor into the valley�s health care construction market.
Despite the recession, health care projects have been healthy in the Phoenix area.
Two Banner Health hospitals were completed in the last two quarters of 2009: the Cardon Children’s Medical Center in Mesa and Ironwood Medical Center in Pinal County.
In addition, construction and renovation projects at Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, which includes the Cardon Center, are ongoing.
Phoenix-based Banner Health, with 22 hospitals in seven states and 11 in Arizona, is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems and the state’s third largest employer.
The seven-story Cardon Center opened in November. It was designed by the Phoenix office of Omaha, Neb.-based HDR Architecture and built by Kitchell of Phoenix.
The approximately $200-million center increases Banner Desert’s pediatric capacity to 248 beds and expands its intensive-care units for newborns and children, operating rooms and emergency space.
Kitchell also built the first two floors of a future 368-bed tower.
Jim Pullen, the company’s project director for Cardon and the ongoing projects, says his team confronted two major obstacles during the early stage of design and construction.
First, prior to building, Salt River Project changed the flood plain of its nearby Pima-Maricopa irrigation canal to incorporate the Banner Desert Hospital campus, which also negated the planned 25,000-sq-ft basement. HDR redesigned the foundation system and designed a replacement 30,000-sq-ft ancillary building, and that meant Kitchell had to rework its schedule.
In addition, the original plan called for an expanded neonatal intensive-care unit as a third-story addition east of the existing NICU. In early 2008, Kitchell had added 20 beds to the NICU in the existing building as Phase I.
However, the city of Mesa had recently adopted the International Building Code in lieu of the Uniform Building Code, reducing the structural-load capacity on the existing building.
As a result, the only option was to build Phase II as a third-story addition on the roof north of the existing NICU above the existing surgery department. “This meant this phase had to be completed prior to the new Cardon Children’s Center because we couldn’t reach this area with a crane once the new hospital was built,” Pullen says. As part of Phase I, Kitchell also built shell space in preparation for Phase II.
Success meant closely coordinating the new children’s hospital with the existing, and functioning, medical center. The two structures are connected along the north elevation of the original building.
“It was our job to make sure that we always kept the patients and staff safe, so that departments could continue to provide patient care and minimize disruptions to their day-to-day business while we were building the new hospital next to their departments,” Pullen says.
With the Cardon Center open, Kitchell is completing $23 million in projects that will upgrade areas of Banner Desert and integrate the new children’s hospital with it.
Scheduled for completion through 2010 and into 2011, the projects include creating three new operating rooms in the renovated operating rooms area; renovating the existing adult pharmacy and medical records; redoing...
Banner Health injects vigor into the valley�s health care construction market.
...the kitchen and server area to match the new contiguous area in the Cardon Center; and gutting and renovating the adult emergency department in a two-phase project. HDR provided the designs.
“We first tried to identify all impacts by department from utility outages, noising activities, traffic-pattern changes to anything that might affect the staff and or patients,” Pullen says. “We developed a detailed matrix that was discussed weekly with the owner’s staff, facilities and the director of each department. We also used the owner’s public relations department to announce the disruption in their weekly newsletter.”
In Pinal County, McCarthy Building Cos. of Tempe completed the $82-million Banner Ironwood Medical Center at Combs and Gantzel roads, adjacent to the town of Queen Creek, in September.
The center was designed by Phoenixbased SmithGroup.
Because of the recession, Banner Health plans a Nov. 1 opening this year. The community hospital will serve the San Tan Valley, northern Pinal County and Queen Creek.
The 233,000-sq-ft phase one includes a five-story nursing tower with 36 inpatient beds and a two-story diagnostic and treatment block that houses imaging, surgery and an 18-bay emergency department.
Future expansion in the tower will add up to 86 beds.
Despite the economy, “we still had an aggressive schedule and kept the momentum and incentive to finish,” says Chris Nickle, McCarthy’s project manager.
The hospital was designed with a modernist philosophy, says Mark Patterson, AIA, LEED AP, who served as health care studio director for SmithGroup. Green features include the use of regional materials — in particular, Trenwyth Masonry Units used for structure and veneer; massing that reflects building functions; and high-performance glazing and window placement to maximize daylighting while shielding occupants from the desert heat.
For SmithGroup, the challenge was to build flexibility into a start-up community hospital. “We had to plan for ultimate growth to over 500 beds when the region warrants the need for a tertiary care facility,” Patterson says. One strategy includes the creation of “soft space” that may start as administration, storage or meeting space. And, by planning the final build-out, SmithGroup designed a modular central plant that can be relocated as well as a utility “spine” that will grow with the facility.
Throughout design and construction, building information modeling was used to save time, money and stress, facilitating delivery in just 22 months. With the use of Navisworks, for example, the McCarthy team detected 1,000-1,500 clashes in virtual building before real-world construction.
Both SmithGroup and McCarthy say BIM was most productive in the 3-D mock-up of a typical patient room. Using just built-in-place models is the traditional approach, but these can shorten the capacity for changes to be made by the end-user. The design/construction team showed Banner personnel the virtual room, with all components in place, and allowed changes at a preconstruction stage.
By the time McCarthy built the physical mock-up based on the virtual model, Banner had no changes, Nickle says. “With this approach, we saved a month to three months time for everyone,” he adds.
