New intensive care unit offers latest technology

Dan Kulin

Friday, Jan. 10, 2003 | 9:17 a.m.

The new $17.5 million adult cardiovascular intensive care unit at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center will add much-needed bed space for critically injured patients and will offer the latest technology, hospital officials said Thursday.

Twenty patients will move into the new intensive care unit Monday and the rest of the 42 beds in the new unit will open Jan. 20, after equipment is moved into the rest of the rooms, said Ann Dachel, a nurse manager in the hospital's existing 72-bed intensive care unit.

The addition will eliminate the wait for a bed in an intensive care unit, which at times can last a day, she said.

"We have patients waiting in the recovery room and emergency room (beds)," Dachel said.

The new intensive care unit will "meet the needs of the community and give us everything that's new," she said. "Everything is the latest and greatest."

The rooms in the new intensive care unit are equipped with the best monitors, ventilators, intravenous pumps and beds, hospital officials said.

"The doctors and nurses get really excited about the technology," said Margaret LaBeur, nurse manager in the new intensive care unit. "But the patients really only care about comfort."

The 42 new beds are the key to patient comfort, she said.

The Hill-Rom Totalcare Sport "is the most advanced bed on the market," said Gigi Pusateri, the nurse who will train others on the equipment in the new unit. "It does everything but heat them."

Each one of the $23,000 beds can roll a patient over, fold and rise to bring a person from a lying to a standing position, vibrate and shake to help loosen congestion in a patient's lungs and be used as an X-ray table.

The beds also have built-in pillows and are designed to use air pumped into the bed to adjust the pressure along the bed to make patients more comfortable.

Sunrise also is one of only three hospitals in the West to have Philips IntelliVue MP70 monitors, officials said. The monitors in the new rooms can display up to eight different lines of information, such as a patient's heart and breathing rates. Other monitors in the hospital can show up to six lines of information.

"We're better able to see exactly how a patient is doing," Pusateri said.

The hospital's new intravenous pumps can pump three separate fluids at once, whereas the hospital's other pumps have space for two fluids.

Sunrise's new Nellcor Puritan Bennett 840 Ventilator System is a ventilator that can adjust for resistance in the tube.

And all of the new rooms have computers for the nurses to use, and the sliding glass doors on each room can swing open in an emergency.

The new intensive care unit will also have a mechanical pump and untrafiltration system designed to remove excess fluid, which can collect in lungs or lower limbs.

"The nurses and doctors always want the latest and greatest gizmos and this is it," LaBeur said.

The unit, which was built on top of the new emergency room, will specialize in heart patients but will also take others, she said.

The expansion is part of an ongoing $92.9 million construction plan that includes expanding the Sunrise Children's Hospital and Sunrise Women's Services, which are connected to the main hospital near the intersection of Maryland Parkway and Desert Inn Road.

The 730-bed hospital also plans to renovate the old intensive care unit in stages over the next 12 to 18 months, Dachel said.