A Fit Prognosis

New Hospitals, Research Facilities Are Just What St. Louis Ordered

by Steve Kaelble

Talk about a healthy industry. Hospital-related projects are keeping construction crews busy in the St. Louis area.

From new facilities and patient towers to expansions and renovations, projects totaling hundreds of millions of dollars are located all over town.

“Because of the nature of the [aging] population, we have more need for health care,” says Dennis Lavallee, president of the St. Louis Council of Construction Consumers. “Each of the major hospital companies has had a fair number of projects. It’s a high-growth industry.”

Data from McGraw-Hill construction, publisher of Midwest Construction, show that medical construction was up 15% in 2007 in St. Louis over the previous year, to $259 million.

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Among the area’s biggest current projects is the SSM St. Clare Health Center rising on the site of a golf course in Fenton. It’s a $224 million, 430,000-sq-ft, 154-bed facility being built to replace the existing SSM St. Joseph Hospital in nearby Kirkwood.

SSM St. Clare is designed with the latest patient-focused ideas in mind, says Dave Gough, vice president of buildings and health care at Alberici Constructors, the contractor. For example, the five-level patient wing has all “single-handed” rooms, meaning that the layout of each room is the same.

“It’s evidence-based design, a way to improve productivity and reduce accidents,” Gough says.

The rooms are all private, and they’re spacious, about 350 sq ft each, with plenty of room for family to visit and even sleep over. The project also includes a 24-hour emergency department, full medical/surgical services, an outpatient care center and a medical office building.

Gough says the exterior design is modern, made of St. Louis brick with rustication on the corner. The structure is steel with poured floors, and the patient tower is marked by floor-to-ceiling, glass-punch-out windows that are intended to let in lots of light.

That’s a characteristic that also reflects the latest evidence-based design trends influenced by the healing properties of natural light. Curtain wall lets more light into the entry and the family waiting areas. Some of the rooms in the patient tower look out over a first-floor roof, which is planned as a “green” roof, with hardy, live plantings softening the look and reducing the environmental impact of the building.

Sitework began in September 2006, and because the 54-acre site had been a golf course, workers began turning up scores of old golf balls. The building is scheduled for completion in January 2009, with a grand opening planned at the end of March.

A common trend in hospital construction is the tendency to plan ahead for future growth, and the St. Clare project is no exception. It’s designed to allow construction and easy integration of another four-story bed tower in the future.

New Patient Tower

Taking that idea to the extreme is the new patient tower at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in the west suburbs. Being built by St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos., it’s a 358,000-sq-ft, 10-story, $90 million project, but initially just the top three floors will be finished and used, with the remainder shelled in for future finalization.

“A lot of times it makes sense to get the structure up,” says Paul Hartwig, senior vice president of operations for McCarthy.

The remainder of the concrete frame structure won’t be vacant for all that long after the initial completion toward the end of 2009. More work could happen as soon as a year or two later, Hartwig says.

The plan allows for an opening in stages, and the use of part of the building begins to generate revenues that support the buildout of the remainder.

“We’ll plan to have construction access separate from patients,” Hartwig says. Those on the existing floors won’t even be aware of the construction going on below, he adds.

McCarthy is also involved in a three-stage project at St. Anthony’s Medical Center in the southern part of St. Louis County. The $88 million project includes a pediatric emergency room expansion completed in November, a four-floor, 145,400-sq-ft patient tower just finished in June and a remodel of all operating room suites by the end of 2009. About 82,400 sq ft of space is being renovated.

The OR project is a complicated one, because the unit needs to remain functional while construction work proceeds. “It’s a very detailed process, with four phases of work,” Hartwig says.

The surgical unit will be closed off one section at a time, and contractors will maintain negative air pressure in the construction zone to preserve the air quality in the operational part of the unit. They’ll have to maintain utilities while they work and keep vibration to a minimum.

Hartwig says the biggest issue facing all of these projects is construction cost uncertainties.

“In the last 20 years the escalation has been fairly predictable, 3 to 5%,” he says. “But in 2007 and 2007 we saw figures that were twice that.”

Master Plan, Research Center Under Way

The St. Louis landscape is dotted with other hospital and health-care projects going on now or on the way, including a patient tower and master plan implementation at Missouri Baptist Hospital that will begin construction next year.

Another major project tied to health is the BJC Institute of Health at Washington University, an 11-story, 700,000-sq-ft structure due to be finished in December 2009. The building will include laboratories, two of the medical school’s academic departments and a range of support services for nearby Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

It’ll be the hub of BioMed21, a major research initiative. Cost has been reported at $235 million, and St. Louis-based S.M. Wilson is the general contractor.

Lavallee of the St. Louis Council of Construction Consumers says the wealth of projects is great for the industry, but combined with construction growth in other sectors, it has the potential to put a strain on the local labor force.

His organization recently studied the market, and “we saw continued construction growth in most of the sectors surveyed,” he says. “The owner community has an ongoing concern about whether we’ll have an adequate workforce.”

Still, problems haven’t materialized. So far, the schedules of projects have been balanced enough to prevent labor crunches. Most projects are proceeding without much need to hire travelers, “but many of the trades are close to full capacity,” Lavallee says.

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