State-of-the-art hospital opens in Centurion

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

If you are the interior architect who designed the inside of the new Mediclinic Midstream hospital in Centurion, you ride around in one to ensure you can get around easily enough.

The hospital was opened yesterday and will see doctors able to monitor patients remotely via a secure server.

“It’s good to be able to monitor a very sick patient even when you are away from them,” paediatric gastroenterologist Anell Meyer said.

In addition, all theatres are equipped with cameras so operations can be filmed and used for teaching doctors viewing the operation from a training room.

To save on energy, windows have been covered in a transparent film to regulate heat, solar geysers have been installed and grey water is used for watering the garden.

And nurses can forget about walking to collect medicines – these are transported in the roof through tubes from the pharmacy to the wards.

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

Doctors were involved in giving input into the design to ensure patient needs were put first. Designers thought about the services a critically ill patient needs when he or she arrives at hospital.

They ensured the emergency entrance, the ICU, a theatre for surgery and the radiology department offering X-rays and scans were all on the same ground floor.

This means critically ill patients do not have to be transported in lifts by nurses or porters, saving valuable time.

All intensive care units have isolation rooms with negative air pressure so that airborne germs do not flow out into the wards.

The first patient was given a caesarian section at 5am yesterday.