Bradley expansion designed to meet children’s needs

BRADLEY HOSPITAL broke ground April 14 for a five-building addition, shown above, designed to use green space to help child patients relax.  /
BRADLEY HOSPITAL broke ground April 14 for a five-building addition, shown above, designed to use green space to help child patients relax. /

When Bradley Hospital designed an addition to its five-building East Providence campus, hospital administrators were eager to create a patient-friendly facility.
“With all the experience our clinical folks have had with the current space, this was a chance to say, ‘OK, this is a blank piece of paper,’” Bradley President and CEO Daniel Wall said recently of the effort to seek staff input on the best design for patient care.
What became a three-year design process culminated last week with an April 14 groundbreaking for a new 44,000-square-foot expansion on Veterans Memorial Parkway.
The design that emerged will be a new brick building that’s attached to the current Laufer Building, which has served as the main hospital building since it was built in 1931.
The most simple design element is that the new building will connect to Laufer at two points, creating a courtyard. But that courtyard is also one of the most important design elements, said Dr. Henry Sachs, the hospital’s medical director.
That’s because the hospital, a Lifespan partner, is a psychiatric hospital for children with room for 60 inpatients and another 100 outpatients, he said.
“It’s another green space and opportunity for children to relax,” Sachs said. “But the advantage of that area, in particular, is that it’s all enclosed.” It’s a spot where children who “might want to [be alone]” can spend time, he said.
The hospital used architecture firm S/L/A/M Collaborative, which has offices in Boston, Atlanta, Chicago and Glastonbury, Conn. The firm brought in Architecture Plus, consultants that specialize in health care design, said Sachs.
The new two-story design also lends itself to unusual hallway and room designs. The shorter hallways and private rooms will be a step away from the classic hospital design of the Laufer Building. “It will be less of an institutional setting,” said Wall. “Right now we have long, straight corridors that are like a college dorm in some places. The new design creates more of a family-living setup, with pods” because having a child in a psychiatric hospital can be stressful for parents.
The new wing will house 60 rooms – all private –with 15 beds for children with disabilities on the first floor, said Wall. “It’s a little different in the sense that we got to work with the architects, who came to us with experience in children’s psych hospitals, to be able to lay out the space in a way that works best,” Wall said.
The first phase of the $31.1-million project will be the construction of the new building. That will be followed by a two-phase renovation of the Laufer and Swan House buildings, Wall said. The project should be completed by October 2009. Gilbane Building Inc. will serve as general contractor.
And for a construction project like Bradley’s, the interior is equally important, said Sachs. That included the windows, which, for safety reasons, the hospital had to have specially designed.
“As we’re going through the design process, the architects … gave us a list of what was out there and some of our staff actually had to take a road trip to New York to take a look at hospitals that had various designs,” he said. “If children in single rooms sometimes have a desire to injure themselves, you want something that’s inviting, that doesn’t look institutional, but offers a high degree of security.”
When it comes down to it, many of the hospital’s designs are for safety but they’re also for children, which is important to remember, said Wall. That’s why, along with the courtyard, the new building will abut four new play areas.
“These are kids,” he said. “If you were to take a tour here you’d see kids. Other than the developmentally disabled kids, everybody just looks very normal and, for all practical physical reasons, are normal. They need play space.” •

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