Hospital serving New Hampshire’s largest metro is expanding its ED

Earlier this week, Elliot Hospital, a 296-bed acute care facility in Manchester, N.H., broke ground on a 22,000-sf Emergency Department expansion that is designed to accommodate population growth in Greater Manchester, which increased by 3.17% over a decade to 113,035 in 2020.

BOND Building Construction is the GC on this project, which when completed in early 2023 will add three new trauma bays, 32 private rooms, four pediatric exam rooms, and six psychiatric evaluation rooms. It will also bump up the hospital’s capacity to treat patients to around 65,000 per year, compared to 57,000 currently.

The hospital's existing ED is a 32-bed, full-service Level II Trauma Center, according to the hospital’s website. “The additional space will improve operational workflows for staff to provide outstanding care and document at the bedside,” said John Leary, RN, Director of Emergency Services at Elliot Hospital.

BOND is providing design-build services for the project, whose designers include Environments for Health Architecture (e4h), Simon Design, Fuss & O’Neil, and BR+A Consulting Engineers. The expanded ED will house acute treatment, circulation, nurse station and staff areas, reception and waiting, security, support space, and an Xray machine.

REASSESSING SPACES AND SAFETY

Team from Bond Building Construction

The design-build team from BOND Building Construction, at the groundbreaking of the new addition to Elliot Hospital's ED.

This project was delayed by the COVID-19 outbreak, which gave the design-build team the time to redesign the reception, waiting room, and triage areas, and to add a rapid treatment area to the floorplan. BOND states that these modifications will allow the hospital to isolate infectious patients, increase ventilation and air filtration systems, and add more oxygen port, making it better equipped to handle future pandemics.

Phase 1 of the expansion—which will include construction of the new building (on an existing parking lot) and moving reception, triage and rapid triages into it—is scheduled for completion next February.

Elliot Hospital is a member of Solution Health, a regional healthcare organization that represents Southern New Hampshire Health and Elliot Health System. Neither disclosed the cost of the ED expansion, which has been in the works since 2017 when the hospital decided to reconstruct the layout of its Psychiatric Evaluation program.

Rural hospitals present unique opportunities and challenges for healthcare facility operators. Oftentimes, the infrastructure and building systems have not been updated for years and require significant improvements in order to meet today’s modern medical demands. Additionally, as these smaller, more remote hospitals are acquired by larger regional and national healthcare systems, the first step by new ownership is often to update and rehabilitate the building. But how can this be done thoughtfully, economically, and efficiently in ways that allow the engineering and facility staff to adapt to the changes? And how can the updates accurately reflect the specific needs of rural communities and the afflictions with which these areas most commonly face?