St. Luke’s Sugar Land Hospital
Sugar Land, Texas
A greenfield campus for St Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in suburban Sugar Land, Texas, inclusive of a hospital, medical office building and 545-car parking garage, was delivered utilizing a fast track multiple package design and construction approach. The 220,000-square-foot, five-story hospital offers a wide spectrum of inpatient and outpatient services. A full floor is dedicated to women’s services, including a newborn nursery and a level III neonatal intensive care unit. Critical care services include a 16-bed adult intensive care unit, eight surgical suites, 2 cardiac catheterization labs, and an 11-room emergency department (ED) with five pediatric observation rooms. Adjacent to the ED is a full-service imaging department which provides MRI, CT, Nuclear Medicine, Angiography, Mammography, Ultrasound, General Radiography and Fluoroscopy services.
As the goal was to design a safer hospital, the central focus in improving patient safety was to reduce the transfer distance between the patient bed and the bathroom. The resulting room design yielded an eight-foot distance from the bed to the toilet with the entire patient journey aided by a continuous handrail. All of the 100 private rooms were designed to be same-handed. Although only 10% of patient rooms are required to be handicap-accessible, this design yielded 100% accessibility, with the best solution resulting from the implementation of same-handed patient rooms with offset, corridor-side (inboard) bathrooms. The design also created the potential for a larger window, allowing a greater amount of natural light into the room as well as providing more room in the family zone. The two patient floors include bariatric rooms which can be converted to VIP rooms when required.
A large two-story rotunda, which provides an entry point for both visitors and patients, connects the hospital to the five-story, 125,000-square-foot medical office building, both of which are constructed with steel framing and a glass curtain wall system using highly energy-efficient glass.