Published May 2002

Facility designed with family in mind
Architects use elements of nature to make Pavilion
an inviting place for patients, visitors

By John Wolcott
Herald Business Journal Editor

Providence Everett Medical Center’s Pavilion for Women and Children is much more than simply a new, five-story health-care center. Its design makes it a national model for the next generation of patient-oriented medical facilities.

“I think family-centered care is a growing trend in the health-care industry, and this building design raises the bar,” said David Craven, senior associate at NBBJ of Seattle, the principal designer for the Pavilion. He believes it will attract many visitors, from architects and health-care administrators to physicians and medical specialists.

“If this project isn’t the first of its kind (nationally), it’s certainly one of the first to provide individual rooms for newborns in intensive care, along with facilities to serve families and an overall design that integrates the entire building with the natural setting of the site,” he said.

Craven and NBBJ’s support staff designed the building as an extension of the existing Providence Pacific Campus on Pacific Avenue, linking it by a two-story sky bridge, and integrating the structure into a site bounded by residential streets, homes and a forested ravine.

The building’s three articulated sections are angled to adjust to the site, separated by two glass wedges that extend through the building to allow light to pass into corridors and waiting rooms.

He said the design focuses on “the four archetypal elements of earth, air, fire and water,” encompassing soil, wind, natural light and rain in ways that offer patients and medical staff an open, airy, well-lighted facility.

Included in the design are outdoor patios on the tops of the glass-and-steel wedges; adjacent trees, greenery and scenic outdoor pathways; windows that open for fresh air; plus panoramic views of Port Gardner Bay, the city of Everett and the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges.

Inside, the Pavilion is designed with patients as well as medical staff in mind, from classrooms and waiting areas to the single-occupant birth, delivery and recovery suites for mothers, each equipped for family members’ overnight stays.

An array of state-of-the-art services for women and children are provided in the Pavilion — including a Family Maternity Center, Newborn Intensive Care Unit, Inpatient Pediatrics, Outpatient Pediatric Sub-specialty Clinics, Providence Children’s Center, Medalia Medical Group, The Everett Clinic, the Comprehensive Breast Center and a Family Resource Center.

Babies with special intensive-care needs have individual rooms, rather than wards or nurseries, allowing more privacy and room for families to gather or stay overnight. Three of the rooms are equipped to serve twins.

Others involved in the design of the Pavilion included Everett architects Botesch Nash & Hall, working with NBBJ, and Anshen+Allen Pacific of Seattle, designers of the Comprehensive Breast Center, the Family Resource Center and the Children’s Everett Subspecialty Clinics.

“The (scenic) views from the building, the natural light that enters through the (floor-to-ceiling) room windows and the glass wedges, and the colors and layout of the interior all help to create a healing environment,” said Devin Saylor, a Senior Associate with Botesch Nash & Hall.

“One of the biggest challenges with the breast center was trying to create a warm, non-threatening environment while integrating advanced technology in mammography that is the first of its type to be installed in the United States,” said Adam Kerner, a principal with Anshen+Allen-Pacific.

He said one of the key aspects of the center design was incorporating the suggestions of breast cancer survivors, who worked with the design team extensively. A key feature was to separate the screening side from the diagnostic and treatment side of the breast-care center, Kerner said.

The center will have more than high-tech equipment — such as Instrumentarium Imaging’s new three-dimensional digital mammography scanner — and a comfortable atmosphere, said Margot Connole, Director of the Providence Cancer Institute.

“We want to send a message to the community that we have greatly improved services to women relating to breast health. We also want them to know we designed the center with a team of specialists, physicians, architects and cancer survivors,” she said, with the cancer survivors in particular providing “a lot of common sense” to developing the center’s design and operating procedures.

As a result of the group planning, the center is unique in its approach to screening and treating women for breast cancer, she said, from the less institutional environment to expediting the work-up process and facilitating communication between specialists to create a treatment plan.

New processing procedures are designed to reduce the time it takes to screen, evaluate and inform patients from three weeks to as little as one week.

“Using the ideas of physicians, cancer survivors and others, including the American Cancer Society, Western Washington Medical Group, Radia and The Everett Clinic, we solved a lot of procedural issues as well as facility design issues. The end result was to make the whole experience more efficient and more comfortable for patients,” Connole said.

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