As Hackensack University Medical Center continues to grow in order to achieve their mission of providing advanced, personalized care, they determined that a vertical expansion would be critical in order to further develop their compact urban campus.
RSC Architects designed three new floors totaling 25,000 s.f. on top of the hospital’s existing Emergency Department, which underwent expansion efforts in 2014 and was built to support a vertical expansion of this scale. An additional component of this project involved the gut renovation of 22,000 s.f. of existing semi-private medical/surgical spaces within the hospital’s adjoining St. John’s and Strawbridge Buildings – two of the oldest facilities on campus.
The square footage gained by this renovation work, as well as the overbuild expansion, has allowed Hackensack University Medical Center to construct fifty new private patient rooms across the hospital’s fourth and fifth floors, including a suite of isolation rooms. This eight-bed medical/surgical isolation unit is a unique program that the project team carefully crafted with the hospital, allowing for the self-containment of the floor in the event of a pandemic or outbreak to guarantee that illnesses are not spread throughout the campus. Oversized, acuity-adaptable rooms ensure that patients remain in a single space from their admission through to their discharge from the hospital, with dialysis boxes in every room. Nurse cockpits and ICU-level quantities of medical gases round out the unit, which was designed to adapt to the hospital’s future needs.
