New hospital rooms improve patient care at Saint Mary's Hauenstein Center

GRAND RAPIDS, (WZZM) A new approach to treating critical care patients could reduce medical errors by 70%.

Saint Mary's Hauenstein Center has 64 Acuity-Adaptable rooms. The rooms allow critical care patients to stay in the same room with the same nursing staff for their entire hospital stay.

Hospital officials say the new rooms not only cut-down on medical mistakes but also help with the nursing shortage.

Preparing to transfer patients out of the critical care unit at Saint Mary's Hospital in Grand Rapids used to be a regular part of Molly Gallagher's day but not any more, "We just love it that our patients get to stay here through almost their whole duration of their stay."

Now patients stay in rooms that change with patient needs - instead of the patient transferring to another room.

"They are here from admission to discharge. That could be ten days that could be two days that could be three days." Leanna Krukowski is the Clinical Service Director for Saint Mary's Health Care. She says the latest research on Acuity-Adaptable rooms shows that they improve patient care and cut down on medical mistakes, "When you transfer patients to another unit sometimes there's some ambiguity with do I continue this med do I not continue this med."

But not any more because the rooms also come with an entire team that stays with the patient until they are discharged, "You don't just have nursing care, you have the pharmacist, you have the case manager and they all know the patient." says Krukowski.

The rooms also include overhead cameras for monitoring patients. All tools that help molly spend more time -- taking care of her patient, "We can do our charting here and open our blinds and see into our patients rooms. We get that relationship and it's really neat to get to know them a little bit better."

Typically about 50% of patients are transferred within hospitals every day.

Having Acuity-Adaptable rooms cuts down on confusion for patients and families and other things like additional housekeeping but in order to have an acuity-room based hospital the nurses need to be certified as critical care nurses.