”Completing the Urgent Care Admissions Building at the Ústí nad Orlicí Hospital is a simply exceptional and crucial moment for care provision for the entire area that falls under the jurisdiction of Ústí nad Orlicí, Litomyšl, and Svitavy. I remember when I first heard about the idea to construct a building that alone would consolidate urgent care treatment under one roof from three doctors at the Ústí nad Orlicí Hospital. Together we started to develop this idea, which initially seemed like a vision from the realm of science fiction, but due to help from European funds, we’ve been able to complete the largest building in the region’s history. Both the Ústí nad Orlicí Hospital as well as the region’s entire eastern section deserve such a workplace,” stated Martin Netolický, governor of the Pardubice Region.

Entryway into the Hospital

The construction happened in two phases. These were preceded by a so-called Phase Zero, which was directly initialized on November 20, 2018 by handing over the building site to the contractors for demolition and lasted roughly two months. “This entailed the demolition of certain existing buildings, mainly those that were formerly used for medical transportation services. The execution of the first phase was completed in December of 2019. Primarily this involved the relocation of infrastructure networks, and the construction of a new electrical substation to which the entire hospital has been recently connected. Infrastructure network relocation also included laying down high-voltage and communications cables. This task also covered constructing a new oxygen station that includes mains for supplying all hospital facilities,” said Roman Línek, the deputy governor for investment. The actual process of building the new Urgent Care Admissions Building can be considered the third and final phase.

“Urgent care admissions is reflective of the modern conception of patient care. It represents a kind of entryway into the hospital for the sick. It is one place where decisions are made concerning the methods and procedures for treatment based on the ailment’s type and gravity without having the patient trekking around the hospital grounds in search of individual specialists. Here, there’s a complex of outpatient clinics and examining rooms under one roof – in other words, specialists from a number of fields that have access to diagnostic imaging technology, such as X-ray, ultrasound, and CT scan equipment,”  said Tomáš Gottvald, the general director for the Pardubice Region’s hospitals.

For patients, the main advantage of the new urgent care admissions system is the creation of a single contact point.“In practice, the patient will arrive at the urgent care reception area and after registering for treatment, the healthcare staff will attend to them, first by providing a basic examination in the outpatient areas and then by sending them to a specific specialist workplace if further examination, a procedure, or hospitalization is necessary,” said Michaela Matoušková, the deputy governor for healthcare. Doing this avoids the patient wandering around the hospital grounds or through individual buildings, which is distinctly unpleasant if the patient has medical difficulties. Deputy Governor Matoušková also wished both for all the doctors working in the new building to see much success in treating their patients and for our patients to have the fastest possible return to health.

The Pardubice Region managed to obtain EU  grants for the Urgent Care Admissions Building’s construction through the REACT program, which is intended to help member states recover from the coronavirus pandemic. “Due to good preparatory work, we were able to obtain a grant that amounted to nearly CZK 1.2 billion for our project. Specifically for the second phase of the admissions building in Ústí nad Orlicí, we obtained CZK 150 million from the European Union budget,” said Ladislav Valtr, deputy governor for development and European funds. He was person responsible for the field of healthcare from 2016 to 2020, which covered the preparations for and much of the time executing this building’s construction.

A Building With Four Floors

The Urgent Care Admissions Building has a total of four floors. In the basement, there are technical facilities with stations for HVAC, locker rooms, and other spaces. At ground level, the first floor contains its own outpatient wing, which is the most significant change for arriving patients.

“The patient will enter the spaces for urgent care admissions from the outside directly into a hall with a waiting room and central reception area, where the staff will provide them with necessary information. The patient will also admitted here. With respect to basic patient examination and treatment, the examining rooms for the surgical, internal medicine, neurology, ENT, and urology departments are located near the reception area, as are the examining rooms for emergency medical treatment. After an initial examination, the patient can be sent to other departments if necessary or can be transferred to the specific inpatient department,” said Vratislav Dědek, regional director of healthcare services for the Ústí nad Orlicí, Svitavy, and Litomyšl Hospitals. These areas of urgent care are called low-acuity admissions.

Located on the same floor is an urgent care admission workplace with a separate entrance for patients transported by emergency medical service vehicles; these cases are called high-acuity admissions. This workplace is made up of a hall with five “expectant” or fully ready hospital beds with modern, life-saving medical instruments as well as a separate cubicle with a single bed, a “crash room,” and other necessary facilities.

The other two floors were built with inpatient units for emergency medicine and intensive care, which are connected by means of a hallway leading to the current Building B, which contains operating theaters. The advantage to this is expanding the previously existing block of operating theaters by another emergency unit and another intensive care unit without needing to transport patients around the hospital. Thus, all types of acute and traumatological care are concentrated in Building B and the new Urgent Care Admissions Building.

COVID Did Not Stop Construction

VCES, which has previously completed construction at the Ústí nad Orlicí Hospital, was selected to be the contractor for the second phase by means of a tender. “We’re pleased that the Pardubice Region trusts us to participate in completing the construction of the Ústí nad Orlicí Hospital and thus follow up on previous hospital projects we executed for the Pardubice Region in the past,” said Martin Minařík, the assistant sales director for the company VCES. “Essentially, COVID accompanied us throughout the entire realization, which means that the measures related to it did as well. In the project’s end phase alone, we needed to deal not only with insufficient human resources caused by the third wave of COVID, but also with certain construction materials’ decreasing availability. Thanks to excellent cooperation by all the participants – representatives from the Pardubice Region, the Pardubice Region’s hospitals, project planners, and our subcontractors – the Urgent Care Admissions Building was finally able to be completed in time,” concluded Minařík.