Women's Hospital Baby Mother unit
The Women's Hospital Baby/Mother unit (Photo courtesy HCA Virginia)
HCA Virginia’s Henrico Doctors’ Hospital is seeking to make birth a bit less laborious, or at least more comfortable.
The facility today held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its Women’s Hospital, which has gone through a $40 million expansion and refurbishing that includes private rooms, technology upgrades, and the addition of a 12,000-square-foot new lobby and triage area, according to a release.
Women's Hospital Lobby
Women's Hospital lobby (Photo courtesy HCA Virginia)
The open, airy women’s facility has 27 pre-birth rooms, 16 labor and delivery rooms, and a 29-room mother and baby unit. The bells and whistles include soaking tubs for hydrotherapy in seven of the labor rooms, lighting for color therapy, king-sized beds in the postpartum unit and wireless fetal monitoring. There’s also enhanced communications and electronic infant-security features. You can directly access labor and delivery from the lobby.
Women's Hospital unit
A room in the Women's Hospital (Photo courtesy HCA Virginia)
Henrico welcomed 3,800 babies into the world this year, the most in central Virginia. The hospital says that the facility is designed to facilitate its couplet care approach, in which one nurse cares for a mother and her child and care is done at bedside.
The construction project began in September 2015 and will end with the completion of the neonatal intensive care unit, which is set for September 2017.
Virginia Women’s Center moves
Short Pump in April will become home to the Virginia Women’s Center’s new, larger facility.
The move will entail closing of its facility on John Rolfe Commons, and at St. Mary’s Hospital, according to a release. St. Mary’s staff will move either to the new location or to the Virginia Women’s Center office at Forest Medical.
The Short Pump facility is a two-story structure with 36,000 square feet of space on Graham Meadow Drive. It is set to open in April. The Virginia Women’s Center says the move is to better accommodate its patients. It will offer a one-stop center for many services, with its offerings including gynecological and obstetrical care; breast, bone and mental health; maternal-fetal medicine; ultrasound; and surgeries, according to a release.
The center's doctors will continue to provide services at Richmond-area hospitals, including St. Mary’s.
CAPSULES
A weekly roundup of health and medicine news
- A new helipad is open at HCA Virginia’s Johnston-Willis hospital. It’s just outside the hospital’s emergency department, connected by a ramp for easy access. A ribbon cutting was held today.
- People with disabilities and their family members can save for their future needs without endangering their health care benefits through a new program, ABLEnow. Virginia529 administers the program. National enrollment opens Dec. 19.
- The Medicines for All Initiative of the engineering school at Virginia Commonwealth University has received $5 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a cost-effective way to manufacture a new HIV/AIDS drug. The lead investigator is B. Frank Gupton, a professor and chair in the Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want you to get your flu shot. The agency reports that the number of Americans receiving flu shots is about on track with the number to receive them at this point in the flu season last year.
