Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital, an award-winning rural teaching hospital serving 29 communities across Pennsylvania and New York, expanded its emergency department to meet growing demand and accommodate patient volumes triple its original capacity.
Challenge
The challenge was to expand emergency services within an active hospital environment while maintaining uninterrupted patient care. Accommodating growing patient volumes required a design that could improve operational efficiency and support future growth.
Solution
Our Health Sciences team applied a Lean Process planning approach, incorporating insights from medical staff and patients into the design. A highly complex phasing strategy allowed the existing emergency department to remain fully operational throughout construction. The project included a 4,500-square-foot addition, a new ambulance entrance, decontamination facilities, an expanded patient drop-off area, and upgrades enabled by the repurposing of a former critical care unit.
Outcome
The expansion transforms the emergency department’s capacity from 25,000 to 75,000 patient visits annually, enabling Guthrie to better serve its growing community. Improved emergency access, expanded treatment capacity, and enhanced operational efficiency strengthen the hospital’s ability to deliver high-quality care well into the future.
A highly complex phasing strategy maintained uninterrupted emergency services throughout construction, which included the delivery of a new ambulance entrance, decontamination facilities, and expanded patient drop-off areas.
Stressed beyond capacity, the Guthrie Clinic emergency department at Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre, Pennsylvania needed to accommodate three times the patient visits that it was originally built to manage. NORR’s Health Sciences team applied a Lean Process planning method that incorporated valuable insights from medical staff and patients into the layout of the expansion.
Since the existing emergency department had to remain fully functional during construction, NORR used a highly complex phasing approach to minimize the renovation’s impact on ongoing services. Annexed space from a vacated critical care unit allowed the NORR team to create a new 4,500 square foot (418 square meter) addition with a new ambulance entrance, decontamination system and an expanded patient drop-off with a natural stone and wood canopy. This renovation allows Guthrie to expand vital services to the growing community by transforming an emergency department that originally handled 25,000 patient visits per year into one that provides for 75,000.