As the Greater Baltimore Medical Center prepares to open its new 60-bed Louis and Phyllis Friedman inpatient facility on Nov. 4, leaders of the project have made it clear that the heart of the hospital is its people.
Rebecca Stover, Director of Project Management at GBMC HealthCare, said the team sought to create a facility where they would want their family to be treated.
“I’ve been a patient here,” Stover said. “My family member has been a patient here. I had my baby here. This is where I come for my healthcare. I am a part of building something for the community. You have it in mind when you’re building the building–-you’re building it for how you and your loved ones would like to be treated. It really speaks to me that you’re building a space here truly for your own loved ones.”
Alongside Senior Director of Construction, Planning, and Energy Russell Sadler, Stover led a community-wide effort called the Promise Project, which not only updated GBMC’s inpatient facilities to modern standards, but is well on its way to providing the healthcare system with a new cancer center too.
The Sandra R. Berman Pavilion cancer center is still under construction, but it is expected to be a book end to the $108 million Promise Project, with a goal of $50 million in public funding from greater Baltimore.
“The actual cancer center will begin in 2025,” Sadler said. “We’re 50 percent there. The superstructure is done, We start framing this calendar year. So we’ll be done with the interior build-out December of 2024. Then we have a transition time of moving in equipment, distributing furniture, training staff, and then opening in early 2025.”
The construction of the new inpatient facility included doubling of private patient room sizes.
The new inpatient center includes a new main floor, and two acute care floors, each with 30 beds. Many of the old 1960s-era private patient rooms were demolished to make way for advances in 21st century medicine. Each new room has twice the square footage of the 1965 rooms, and also includes soundproofing for a more peaceful recovery of patients.
“People had rooms that were state-of-the-art for 1965,” Sadler noted,” but you look at it now and it was one of the smaller (private) rooms in the state. They were just these tiny little rooms. For every three old rooms we’ll demolish, we’ll create two existing rooms.””
The new Friedman building raises the standard of GBMC for the next decade of design and planning, Sadler said.
GBMC is a 257-bed acute and sub-acute community medical center. With 1,100 physicians, according to the GBMC website, it is considered to be one of the largest community hospitals in the MidAtlantic region of the United States.
The Promise Project started several years ago. Those involved had to overcome multiple challenges, particularly the pressure that the pandemic put on the healthcare system, as well as the smoky air from Canadian wildfires that slowed progress.
“I’m really proud of the project and the team,” Sadler said. “We always found a way to improvise and adapt.”
“It just took us being creative– having emotional intelligence, and being able to read the room,” Stover added.
In the middle of the pandemic, hospital staff experienced a huge influx of patients and demand on their time. The Promise Project leadership had to balance staying committed to everyone providing input on the new construction, while also having realistic expectations during a national medical emergency.
Stover said she had to know which staff members had the capacity for decision making, and whom she needed to wait to hear from until the next week.
“We very much wanted an interdisciplinary approach and feedback with the design,” she said. “When you have frontline staff whose focus is on the patient, the patient should be and will be first. That is top priority.”
Both Stover and Sadler expressed their sense of fulfillment in seeing part of the promise being kept, with more to follow in the coming years. They said that the real enjoyment from their experience of being trusted to lead the project has been working with all the other people in the hospital’s community who helped make it happen.
“It wouldn’t have been possible without the team,” Stover said. “They make my job easy because they are incredible.”
“You’re really driven by what you’re doing is going to help people when they really need it the most,” Sadler added.
There will be a public community event celebrating the opening of the Friedman building Nov. 4 at 10 a.m.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article reported that the Louis and Phyllis Friedman inpatient facility was a renovated building. The facility is new construction.
