UMass Memorial remaking University Campus psychiatric, cancer spaces

Photo | Grant Welker Kathleen Kender, a nurse manager at UMass Memorial Medical Center's psychiatric unit, shows a "sensory room" where patients can use different ways to calm themselves.

Photo | Grant Welker Kathleen Hylka, director of strategic space planning for UMass Memorial, right, shows off what will soon become the hospital's medical and surgical unit for cancer care.

Photo | Grant Welker UMass Memorial Medical Center's 120-bed outpatient mental health facility on Mountain Road East in Worcester, which has allowed for more room for services on its University Campus.

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By Grant Welker

For much of the past two years, UMass Memorial Medical Center has been overhauling the eighth floor of a building on its University Campus in Worcester, first with a remade psychiatric unit and soon a cancer-specialized medical and surgical unit.

For both units, hospital officials are touting layouts and features friendly to both patients and staff, as well as an arrangement of services helping UMass Memorial keep up with a rising demand for treatment space.

“It was an enormous upgrade,” Kathleen Hylka, the hospital's director of strategic space planning, said during a tour of the new psychiatric unit Wednesday, showing a unit she said hadn’t been updated since the 1970s.

The psychiatric unit is far smaller than in the past, with more psychiatric treatment options instead available off-campus. Last winter, UMass opened a 120-bed facility at Mountain Street East and Century Drive, the Hospital for Behavioral Medicine. Taravista Behavioral Health in Devens and Westborough Behavioral Healthcare Hospital offer those services, too.

That change opened up the top floor of the University Campus building for a smaller seven-room, 14-bed psychiatric unit opened late last year. The remade unit includes larger common areas and a room designed for sensory-calming actions.

Patient rooms are double occupancy unless single occupancy is required for safety or other reasons, a step UMass Memorial President Michael Gustafson said was done to help patients feel less isolated.

So far, the unit has averaged roughly 85% occupancy, with an average stay of about a week and a half before patients can go home or be transferred to a facility best fitting heir needs.

The unit was designed, like other hospital psychiatric units, with extra safety precautions in mind to keep patients from harming themselves, including specially designed faucets, door handles and hinges, and heavy furniture that's more difficult to move.

It’s also set up to more easily hold group therapy.

Access to other hospital services is beneficial, said Dr. Caridad Ponce-Martinez, the unit’s medical director.

“This is very different from a standalone hospital,” she said. “We’re able to provide a lot more complex care.”

By around the end of the year, a medical and surgical unit specifically for cancer patients is due to open on the remainder of the eighth floor not already taken up by the hospital’s bone marrow transplant unit. It’ll be the first time the hospital has a dedicated area for all cancer care.

The unit was designed to feel more comfortable to patients as if they’re in a hotel, hospital officials said, with decor colors and designs feeling more welcoming than sterile. For staff, work space was designed to allow for better working in groups than in the past, and with a break room looking out over the hospital’s green space — not a windowless room in the middle of the unit as is often the case in older designs.

Construction is expected to be substantially complete by the end of October, with the hospital seeking state approval in November. The unit should open to patients by December or January.

The remade eighth floor, whose cost was pegged at $30 million at the outset, won’t be the last expansion at the University Campus.

The hospital also needs more room, Gustafson said. Around 80% of patient rooms are double occupancy, but the hospital would like to see 80% to be single-occupancy.

A major expansion, with a building costing $500 million to $700 million, could be on the horizon in as little as five years, he said.

Another new building will rise on the campus before then.

On Monday, UMass Medical School — which shares the site with the hospital — announced it will build a 100,000-square-foot building on Belmont Street where a state Department of Transportation office now stands. A Veterans Affairs clinic will take up about half the space, with the $70-million to $75-million building set to open in mid-2021.