The new Stanford Hospital had been open a matter of months when the pandemic struck. People began pouring in, worried they might be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. 

Springing into action, hospital staff turned an adjacent parking garage into a drive-up testing and screening site in just 12 hours. Gowned and gloved nurses took nasal swabs of people in their cars and checked their vital signs through the windows. Patients also were evaluated by an emergency physician from their cars via internet video, enabled by a new wireless system installed in the garage.

“Multiple departments within the hospital came together overnight,” said Patrice Callagy, RN, executive director of emergency services at Stanford Health Care.

For Stanford Health Care President and CEO David Entwistle, the response to the pandemic was a demonstration of exactly what the new hospital building, at 500 Pasteur Drive in Palo Alto, was made to handle. “This state-of-the-art building was designed to enable our exceptional staff to do their very best under worst-case scenarios: mass casualty, natural disaster or even a global pandemic,” Entwistle said. “We didn’t expect to be challenged so soon, but, because of this new facility, we were ready.”

The 368-bed hospital building, which celebrates its one-year anniversary Nov. 17, has proved to be an adaptable and effective facility for handling the pandemic. The increased space, new technologies and private patient rooms, as well as other design features, all have helped keep patients, staff and clinicians safe during the nation’s worst infectious disease outbreak since 1918.

“We are so fortunate, from a timing standpoint, that we had the new hospital and the entire staff trained three months before this happened,” said architect George Tingwald, MD, director of medical planning at Stanford Health Care. “I won’t say it was a miracle, but if COVID-19 had happened a year before, we would have been in a world of hurt.”

Bigger, better emergency department

Doctors and staff in the new Marc and Laura Andreessen Adult Emergency Department are often the first points of contact for patients arriving at the hospital, and they were able to adapt particularly well during the crisis because of the department’s increased space and new features. The department has a total of 66 rooms, most of them private, so caregivers can handle a large influx of patients while minimizing exposure to the virus. The unit is as big as a football field — three times the size of the previous emergency department — so patients can be seated at a safe distance from one another in the lobby and segregated if they showed signs of infection.