NYHQ Expansion To Open In June
By KAITLYN KILMETIS
Last week, Project Manager Tom Gucciardo gave the Queens Tribune an exclusive walk through of New York Hospital Queens’ massive expansion project. |
| Construction crews are working hard to ensure the new wing will open in June. |
The addition, known as the hospital’s Major Modernization Program, is slated to open this June and will add another 190,000 square feet to the Flushing facility located at the intersection of Main Street and Booth Memorial Avenue.
The $210 million addition, started in 2007, will reconfigure the hospital’s entryway with a new main entrance, a canopied patient drop off area, a new reception lobby, two new chapels and a new gift shop.
The project also features the hospital’s new seven-story “West Wing,” a, integrated, modernized and largely naturally-lit section of the hospital set to serve a number of purposes.
The wing’s ground floor will serve as an Ambulatory Surgery Center, with 10 state-of-the-art operating rooms and 33 recovery beds. The operating rooms are laid out in a racetrack-shaped pattern and each will be accessed by patients through perimeter entrances. The center of the floor will serve as a sterile area to house supplies, accessible through each operating room. The operations performed on the floor will mostly be minimally-invasive, same-day procedures.
The second floor will expand the hospital’s current Heart & Vascular Center by increasing treatment rooms from five up to 10. According to NYHQ, the floor will feature the capability to perform angiograms and other cardiac catheterization procedures, electrophysiology suites for pacemaker and internal defibrillator procedures and treatment areas for interventional radiology procedures.
The fourth and fifth floors house a total of 80 beds for inpatient care – 40 per floor, including 28 single-bed private rooms. Part of the fourth floor will be designated for orthopedics and rehabilitation and the fifth floor will serve as a general medical surgical unit.
Each of the floors is connected by a rampway bridge to the hospital’s original floors and the project planners endeavor to create a seamless transition between the two wings.
“Architecturally, the goal would be as you move from the new to the old you won’t know the difference,” Gucciardo said. “That’s the goal.”
Also, although the project originally included five floors, an additional two floors were added to the construction plans to allow for expansion. The two top floors will remain vacant until the hospital decides what further additions to make.
Gucciardo also emphasized the fact that the new wing is completely self-sufficient with its own independent heating and cooling systems, power sources and air-circulations apparatuses.
He added that it is most important to recognize the addition is a thoroughly-modern facility complete with a slew of advances to accommodate patient privacy and infection control, and to create an increasingly patient-friendly atmosphere through bright, airy décor and a number of panorama views of the borough.
“There are very definitely features in this building that one wouldn’t find in a building like this 10, 15 years ago,” Gucciardo said.
For more information about the project, visit nyhq.org.
Reach Reporter Kaitlyn Kilmetis at kkilmetis@queenstribune.com, or (718) 357-7400, Ext. 128.