Taking high tech to heart for Bayfront surgery
Bayfront Medical Center's $29-million expansion includes 10 operating rooms with more square feet and improved technology.
By LISA GREENE
Published February 22, 2006
ST. PETERSBURG - Surgeons at Bayfront Medical Center will soon pick up their scalpels in new operating rooms up to twice the size of the old ones, with stronger lighting and a bevy of high-tech toys.
In some operating rooms, even the air to breathe has been engineered for better patient care.
Hospital officials gave a tour Tuesday of the $29-million expansion, with its 10 operating rooms stretching the length of a football field.
"It's a tremendous step forward for Bayfront," said Dr. Robert Swiggett, an orthopedic surgeon who will use one of the new orthopedic operating rooms when the space opens March 6. "It's as state of the art as it gets."
Swiggett operated on a plastic "patient" Tuesday afternoon and pointed out some of the key features of his new work space. Just for starters, it's bigger: nearly 600 square feet, compared with about 300 square feet in the old rooms.
Other new surgical suites will be about 450 square feet. But all the rooms will have more work space because of better technology. Flat-screen monitors hang from the ceiling instead of being wheeled in on carts.
In the two orthopedics rooms, a special filtering system moves air horizontally, rather than vertically.
"This should cut down on infections," Swiggett said.
The operating rooms will also feature high-tech electronics. The monitors in each room will be able to display images from cameras inside patients' bodies, as many surgical suites now do. They also will be capable of showing a patient's MRI, X-ray or CT scans, as well as lab results.
To see that information now, surgeons must walk to a viewing box or a computer across the room. Instead, said Ann Altaffer, director of surgical services, "the surgeon never has to leave the patient."
The improved technology also will allow surgeons to broadcast images outside the hospital, said Mike Fox, local area manager for Stryker Corp., manufacturer of much of the equipment.
A surgeon facing a difficult case could send images to a surgeon in an operating room down the hall, an office across town or a hospital across the country.
The hospital also will have a new cardiovascular operating room, allowing Bayfront to perform adult open-heart surgery there instead of at neighboring All Children's Hospital.
Bayfront had eight operating rooms. Two of those will be renovated for neurosurgery, giving the hospital a total of 12 once the work is complete. The other old operating rooms will be replaced with space for preoperating care and postsurgery recovery.
In the preoperating area Tuesday, workers were outfitting light fixtures with decorative panels, so that patients about to have surgery will look up and see images of gardens, beaches and palm trees instead of fluorescent light boxes.