Meriter Hospital was established more than 100 years ago by forward-thinking citizens who recognized an important void in the Madison area - an organization to meet the health care needs of the then-burgeoning community.

Meeting the community's health care needs is still at the heart of Meriter's mission. And while our community continues to grow and its health care needs change, health care standards continuously evolve.

Committed to the Meriter Park Street Campus serving as our primary medical facility, our challenge is fitting today's standards in decades-old buildings. It is fascinating to look at historic photos of Meriter Hospital expansions over time and note that our oldest building is more than 90 years old; the newest building is 10 years old; with the average age being 40. (Curious about the historical pictures? View the presentation at right.)

In response, Meriter is launching a master facility planning process with Kurt Salmon Associates, a leading health care consulting firm. The goal is to determine what changes we need to make in order to support delivering high quality health care in the next 10, 20 and 30 years.

Driver of Change

Health care technology is an enormous driver of change. Large pieces of equipment need more space, computer technology needs wiring and equipment cooling capacity, and buildings need to have flexible space to adjust to future changes that are, today, unfathomable. To visualize the change in space needs consider that:

• Operating rooms in 1970 = 2,390 square feet
  Today's planning standards = 3, 400 square feet
•  ICU rooms in 1970 = 590 square feet per bed
  Today's standards = 800 square feet
• Emergency Department in 1990 = 580 square feet per treatment room
  Today = 800 square feet

Key Priorities

The planning process has confirmed that our priorities in the next three to five years are:

• Converting all patient rooms to private rooms - this improves patient and family hospital experience, hospital efficiency, infection control efforts and patient privacy
• Consolidating and expanding our women's health services
• Creating medical office space
• Creating a new data center
• Managing our parking needs
• Expanding our critical care unit
• Renovating and expanding our surgery suites
• Improving landscaping throughout the campus

How this is ultimately accomplished is still a work in progress. Meriter is scheduled to complete our master plan by the summer of 2008.

Listening to the Community

In order to get neighborhood feedback, a steering committee convened in the summer of 2007. The committee includes:

• Representatives from the Greenbush neighborhood
• Representatives from the Triangle
• Park Street partners
• Members of the Monona Bay Neighborhood Association
• Representatives from the Neighborhood House
• Representatives from Select Medical
• Alder Julia Kerr

Anyone interested in participating or learning more about the plan is welcome to attend a steering committee meeting. For more information, contact Melissa Huggins, Meriter Senior Planning Associate, at (608) 417-5606 or mhuggins@meriter.com. 

In addition to monthly steering committee meetings, the master planning process will include:

• Neighborhood meetings
• Regular meetings with city staff
• Presentations to City of Madison boards and commissions, including the Plan Commission, the Urban Design Commission and the City Council

4/7/2008