Healthcare Design - September 2016 - 62

PA R T O F T H E P L A N

Despite growing recognition that providing
appropriate spaces for employees should be a
priority, hospital leadership is often also faced
with scarce resources and the necessity to
balance efforts with improvements to revenuegenerating areas. To that end, dual-purpose design solutions are an easier sell: spaces available
to patients, visitors, and staff, or staff-only spaces that nimbly swing between personal and professional applications. "Healthcare leadership
is reticent about putting in employee-dedicated
space, as anyone is, but they're willing to put in

SEPTEMBER 2016

The Loft, offering numerous dining spaces,
is open to all Josie
Robertson Surgery
Center employees.
One seating option
is a communal table,
showcasing a highgloss butcher block
top and cobalt blue
tile base.

Opportunities for staff to
leave the Josie Robertson
Surgery Center of Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK)
Cancer Center in New
York for breaks aren't
always feasible. "Because of the nature of this
particular type of service,
there's a constant turnover
of patients and we need
all hands on deck. Breaks
are tight," says Suzen L.
Heeley, executive director
of design and construction at MSK.
The building's
solution is The Loft, an
employee-dedicated floor
featuring dining, respite,
conference areas, and a
garden terrace. Two sides
of this floor-wide space
offer extensive views of
the city.
"Large planters on the
terrace contain lovely
birch trees, which look full
and green in the warmweather season and
elegantly sculptural in
the cold-weather months;
uplighting highlights the
plantings and illuminates

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the terrace in the evening," Heeley says.
The Loft's interior and
exterior combined offer
8,200 square feet of
diversely used spaces
ranging from purposeful
solo to casual communal
to professional collaborative options. Inside,
among The Loft's divided
zones, is The Soapbox,
a central, convertible,
multipurpose space accommodating up to 40
people for presentations
or meetings. When not
hosting a conference,
this area adds to the dining options.
Other zone names
speak for themselves:
Open Kitchen, Living
Room, Market Café. The
Open Kitchen features
a full-service kitchen
and areas to store and
prepare food brought in
from home.
"The whole 14th
floor is exclusive for
employees. That's
extraordinary," says
Dr. Arthur Brown, chief

and medical director of
employee health and
wellness services at
MSK. "It's a large area,
but it has corners. It has
cubbyhole spaces. You
can find a shaded corner
and perhaps take a cat
nap. There are moments
in the employees' day
when they need to be by
themselves and not be
interrupted."
And the space is open
to all employees; gone
are physician-only dining areas. "This is very
democratic: Everybody
comingles," Heeley
says. "The space can
foster great discussion
and collaboration about
patients, operations, and
personal matters-communication opportunities
that did not happen in
the past."
While this is a new
design concept for MSK,
Heeley adds, it could
become a model for
future buildings.

MSK/ADRIAN WILS ON

LOFTY
GOAL

computer access to patient records, and a large
white-board-covered wall. The move bucks the
trend of teaching spaces often created from "a
repurposed old patient room tucked away out
of earshot" or even a closet, says Dr. Lisa Harris,
CEO with Eskenazi Health. "We have spaces that
will accommodate the team. The didactic teaching, the sharing of information, occurs in these
separate spaces, but it also continues at bedside."
Moving a department out of a windowless environment is another step toward promoting employee well-being. Such was the case at the Josie
Robertson Surgery Center of Memorial Sloan
Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center in New York,
designed by architect of record Perkins Eastman
(New York) with design firm ICrave (New York),
with MSK Design, the hospital's in-house design
team, leading the effort. The newly built, 15-story,
181,000-square-foot freestanding facility opened
early this year with a 12th-floor central processing department that has windows looking out
from three sides of the building and providing
natural light. The area continues to be functional
but also speaks to the employees as human beings, says Suzen L. Heeley, executive director of
design and construction at MSK. (For more on
the project, see "Lofty Goal" at right.)
Some functions, however, out of necessity
may remain in hospital basements, such as food
preparation or maintenance. In these areas,
then, care should be paid to feature brightly colored walls, patterned floors, art, and staff break
areas where the facility's color and furnishing
themes continue rather than abruptly end, says
Carolyn Blake, associate with Gresham, Smith
and Partners (Jacksonville, Fla.). Another best
practice is to organize building programs by
placing departments in the basement whose
workers routinely travel to higher floors. "Having people work where they don't know if it's a
beautiful day or a raging thunderstorm outside,
that's a (design) 'don't,'" Harris says.

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Healthcare Design - September 2016

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