The latest in a long series of campus expansions and renovations in recent years, the McLaren Port Huron Hospital (Port Huron, Mich.) recently overhauled its six-floor North Tower in an effort to modernize the existing spaces and continue to attract more patients and staff to the facility. Affecting more than 90,000 square feet of existing space in the 1950s-era building, the North Tower renovation brought improvements to 165 patient rooms, including converting many semi-private patient rooms into private rooms, which allows for more complex care and enhanced patient privacy. In addition, there were several improvements to key services such as a relocated nuclear medicine department, consolidation and reorganization of the interventional cardiovascular suite, and renovations to the support service spaces for hospital operations and staff areas such as nursing operations.
Guiding principles for design were focused on taking this relatively old facility and making it look and function as close to the recently built new facility as reasonably possible. This meant that room and unit design standards had to be transferred as directly as possible to new patient care units. Every detail was looked at and analyzed for application from the new to renovated facility. For example, the patient room windows were old and leaky, from both an efficiency and esthetic perspectives replacement was the only appropriate response. This detail, including others, has made the facility feel and function much like the new facility.
The project was made possible after the 2018 addition of a new South Tower created space for the relocation of key operational functions on the site.
Project details:
Facility name: McLaren Port Huron
Location: Port Huron, Mich.
Completion date: July 2020
Owner: McLaren Health Care
Total building area: 90,000 sq. ft.
Total construction cost: N/A
Cost/sq. ft.: N/A
Architecture firm: HED
Interior design: HED
General contractor: Auch Construction
Engineering: HED
