Safety and Efficiency

Built-in Safety and Efficiency

The Oak Pavilion is designed to enhance patient safety and promote best practices. Private, single patient rooms and easy-to-clean materials throughout the hospital reduce infection rates. To help prevent falls, a common safety issue, we have patient lifts in designated rooms, and every room is equipped with handrails. All our private adult rooms can be converted into positive pressure rooms, meaning that the air pressure in the room is greater than the air pressure in the hallways. This protects our patients from exposure to potential airborne pathogens in the hallways while preventing pathogens from infectious patients from leaving patient rooms. We achieve this advanced level of patient protection through the integration of HEPA air filters, self-closing doors with high pressure seals, fans, and ductwork.

Onstage and Offstage Circulation

Like most of today’s leading-edge hospitals, the Oak Pavilion has separate hallways and elevators for staff and visitors. This reduces traffic in public areas, protects the privacy of patients during transport, and lowers the risk of infection. A separate staff elevator closes the loop between surgery and sterile processing so that contaminated waste can be disposed of without passing through patient or visitor areas.

An Interventional Platform to Streamline Workflow

For easy access, all of our interventional procedures, including surgery, interventional radiology, electrophysiology and cardiac catheterization lab, are grouped together on one floor in an “interventional platform.” Related departments, such as our emergency department and trauma center, are adjacent to imaging and radiology, for faster imaging of trauma patients. Similarly, labor and delivery is situated next to the neonatal intensive care unit. Our new surgical suites are literally twice the size of our old ones, and accommodate all the latest equipment and facilitate complex team surgeries in which two surgeons collaborate to operate on the same person simultaneously.

Ready for Anything: The Emergency Department and Trauma Center

Our new state-of-the-art emergency department and trauma center is designed to increase patient safety, enhance care, and reduce wait times. We have tripled the size of the ED and nearly doubled the number of patient rooms in the ICU. The 21,500-square-foot emergency department and trauma center includes private patient rooms and in-house MRI services, and we have doubled the number of onsite CT scanners. To protect the safety and privacy of all our patients, our new ED has a main entrance and treatment area for the general public, and separate entrances and treatment areas for San Quentin prisoners, psychiatric patients, and trauma patients.