Spoken by Michelle Read—Director of Nursing & Midwifery, Footscray Hospital, Western Health

As you come out of the lifts, there’s an area where relatives and visitors can enjoy the views and it’s quite a lovely, enjoyable space, just to relax and prepare. There’s a multi-purpose room on each floor. This enables patients to receive their therapy with beautiful views overlooking the western suburbs, and whether it’s physiotherapy, and practicing their steps, or a little bit of cooking that they’re working with the Occupational Therapist. The space is quiet, relaxed, but it’s located on the ward so that patients no longer have to go miles to get some therapy. It’d be a great benefit for our patients and staff.

Spoken by Mark Mitchell—Principal, Health Sector Lead, Billard Leece Partnership (BLP)

So the approach we took to things like materials and colours, natural light. It was very much trying to connect people from inside to outside. And you can see things like how we really try to make each of the patient rooms have a unique aspect. So no one room can look out over another room. And therefore, the interior design and the view become one and the same thing. If you look across from the door, you can clearly see where the patient is, but you can see beyond the patient to the bench seat we have there. And that was deliberately designed to allow for a larger family. Some of the people in the community of Footscray have larger families and they discussed how important it is to them to be able to have the family around the patient. So it’s a big bench seat. It slides out to become a day bed in case someone needs to stay overnight with their carer. And we’ve really designed the whole external wall from inside the bedroom to do with the family.

Michelle

It’s really exciting actually at this hospital, we’ve got a state-of-the-art pneumatic tube system. What this means is that our staff can take blood from a patient, pop it in the canister and send it off to pathology. So this means that no staff member is required to actually transport the specimen down to pathology. We’re also able to send pharmacy products through this as well. So, if a medication patient is being discharged and needs some medication, instead of running all the way down to pharmacy, we can put in a request and pharmacy can send it straight through, notifying the nurse in charge that it’s arrived and she can swipe her card and actually just open the portal, and the medication is there.

The pneumatic tube system has about 12 different routes and it’s all run by air compression. So you pop it in and away it goes and disappears. The system is much more sophisticated than those that we’ve previously been used to.

And as we come down into the terrace, this is an amazing space with incredible views. This is really exciting and not many hospitals have this facility, but we’re able to actually push our patients out in a bed if need be. We have oxygen on tap and so patients are able to have the louvres open and hear the noises of the community around them or just enjoy the fresh air and a bit of quiet time.

Mark

You’ll really notice how we’ve connected internal gardens, winter gardens, in with the clinical areas, to try and make those spaces which are traditionally outside, part of the experience of being inside, so that it’s not a concern for staff, if patients and families go into those gardens, they’re still easily found, they’re easily observed, and they’re safe spaces. So that we’ve looked at those gardens as feeling like being outside. They have louver windows so we can get fresh air coming through to there. We’ve raised the ceilings. You can see the ceilings have been raised up and they look quite different to hospital ceilings. And there’s a huge expanse of glass that looks out over each of the different orientations. So we have four of those on each patient floor, one for each 16-bed pod. And the view from each of those is quite different. Now, in those spaces, there’s obviously planting, some biophilia, green spaces that can help you heal through the power of nature.

There’s spaces to stop and have a chat, and those have been set up so they can be side-by-side discussions, so they’re not just family discussions, they could be staff discussions as well. There’s enough space to turn a bed around, to take a bed out of their ward, to take it out into that space and turn it around. And there’s a panel on the wall which allows patients to be connected to gases and the like if they need to.

Michelle

Another great benefit of Footscray Hospital is our local pantry rooms. Food is delivered to each level and then heated and given to patients, directly. This doesn’t happen too often in hospitals and I imagine patients will be very appreciative to have hot, fresh food prepared on the floor that they’re staying at.

I love it when staff come here for the first time. Their eyes are wide. They can’t believe it that, you know, this is going to be ours. To work in a space that’s so spacious, so accommodating and so modern with all the latest bells and whistles. Yeah, they’re just over the moon and the joy around it is just amazing to be a part of.