CTCA expanding surgical department
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PUBLICATION: The Journal Record
DATE PUBLISHED: 1/9/12
AUTHOR: Kirby Lee Davis
TULSA – Oakridge Builders began construction Thursday on a $3.1 million surgical department expansion at Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
This involves a 4,145-square-foot addition along with a 2,898-square-foot renovation of existing surgical space, all following designs by Tulsa architects at PSA-Dewberry.
“We’re looking at probably eight months to complete both the expansion and remodel,” said Karl Berens, CTCA assistant vice president of general services.
The new space will give the 10109 E. 79th St. hospital a third surgical room and a minor procedure room. It also will enlarge CTCA’s two endoscopy suites and one bronchoscopy suite.
This new surgical space will help physicians overcome capacity restraints.
“We’re starting to run into scheduling conflicts and room availability since we recently started doing neural surgeries here and some specialty surgeries,” Berens said in a telephone interview. “A lot of those procedures are very long in time length. It’s not so much the number of surgery count increase as the number of OR time being used.”
With their increased mechanical needs, such surgical suites represent one of the more costly additions.
“Typically each room is its own environment, so if you think of a clinic, for example, you’ll have any number of rooms on a single thermostat and all of them will be on one air handler,” Berens said. “But on a surgical room, each one is on its own space.”
This project follows right on the heels of a 9,958-square-foot CTCA addition by PSA-Dewberry and Oakridge Builders. Finished in December, that $2.5 million project expanded the hospital’s inpatient pharmacy on the second floor and provided separate rooms for mixing and delivering Total Parenteral Nutrition, chemotherapy and antibiotics for patients.
Berens said this involved relocating the pharmacy, since its former space had no room for expanding its mixing rooms. By enlarging these rooms from about 350 square feet to more than 400, Berens said, CTCA could ensure better-quality products and meet code requirements.
“They’re really more to protect the health and well-being of the pharmacists,” he said. “The old pharmacy will be used for future infusion expansion.”
These projects continue CTCA’s history of almost constant construction since its May 2005 opening. The total complex has grown some 50 percent to 300,000 square feet over that time, with nearly all of that overseen by PSA-Dewberry and Oakridge.
When the surgical additions are complete, Berens said he expects CTCA to build out its infusion space.
“We’re going to have to add on to our central plant so that we can add an additional chiller for cooling,” he said. “We also have ordered a second transformer. We’re starting to think about our fiscal ’13 budget, which would start in July. I don’t know if we’ve talked about any other expansions for fiscal ‘13 yet.”
