Where health care is going: Ascension Alexian Brothers opens neurosciences unit to meet demands of aging population
Patients will be on the move Wednesday at Ascension Alexian Brothers hospital in Elk Grove Village, where a new 36-bed neurosciences unit opens.
The 24,000-square-foot space encompasses the fifth floor of the hospital’s east tower — one of two new floors added to the top. The sixth floor is staying vacant for now, while officials evaluate future needs.
It marks the completion of a three-phased, $107 million hospital modernization and expansion project — the first major additions to the Biesterfield Road medical center since the east tower was constructed in 2007.
Ascension Alexian Brothers opened four operating rooms for neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery and 25 postoperative recovery unit rooms during the first two phases of the project in the summer of 2023.
Since then, officials say they’ve had a 35% increase in neurological procedures, including brain and spine surgeries, stroke interventions and treatments for brain tumors.
“The baby boomer population is aging, so we see major needs coming around cardiovascular services and neurosciences,” said hospital President/CEO Dan Doherty. “The demand for these high-acuity services are going to continue to grow.”
“Medicine is advancing so that some of the lower-acuity care can happen in a home environment or in the physician’s office,” he added. “So what we’re doing is creating a hospital that’s set up for where we think health care is going over the next 10 to 15 years, and that is to take care of high-acuity, very sick patients.”
Doherty gave a tour of the new neurosciences floor ahead of its opening Wednesday. It contains 36 patient rooms — 16 of which have negative pressure capabilities, where air gets pulled up into the ventilation system and sent through a system of filters, instead of blowing out under doorways and into the hallway.
Planning for the hospital expansion started in 2019, but the so-called isolation rooms were added to the design during the pandemic.
Fourteen rooms have lifts built into the ceiling, making for a seamless bed-to-cart transition for patients, and an easier job for their nurses.
The rooms also are “ICU capable” — complete with all the medical gases, technologies and outlets for high-tech equipment, Doherty said.
And it may be a “small, but very meaningful” part of the room design, Doherty said, but bathrooms have large sliding doors instead of smaller, swinging ones, to make it easier for patients to get in and out with wheelchairs. Inside is a toilet, shower and sink.
“You think about your average patient from 1966, they were a little bit smaller than your average patient today,” Doherty said in reference to the original west tower on the hospital campus.
Besides patient rooms, the floor also includes a physical therapy space, where patients can practice getting in and out of a bathtub; a family patient consult room, where doctors can meet privately with family members; a staff break room and locker room, and respite room for breastfeeding.
Doherty says patients typically will spend three or four days in recovery after surgery.
Once neuro patients are moved from the sixth floor of the west tower this week, that space will become a staff training area, including simulation rooms for new nurses.