Mayo Clinic Hospital groundbreaking celebration to be held Nov. 11

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Mayo Clinic will hold a groundbreaking celebration for its Mayo Clinic Hospital at noon on Friday, Nov. 11. Sam Nunn, a Mayo Clinic patient and former U.S. senator from Georgia, will give the keynote address. Other speakers are: George Bartley, M.D., chair, Board of Governors Mayo Clinic Jacksonville; Denis Cortese, M.D., president and CEO of Mayo Clinic; Bert Getz, chair, Mayo Clinic Board of Trustees; and Nancy Pitruzzello, R.N., St. Luke's Hospital. The Rev. Billy Graham, evangelist and chairman of the board, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, will give the invocation.

"Mayo Clinic's emphasis for more than a century has been integration: teamwork between various specialists in the care of the patient; collaboration between clinicians, researchers, and educators; and, increasingly, integration of Mayo's activities across our various sites in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Arizona, as well as Florida," says Bartley. The Nov. 11 event, to be held on the grounds of Mayo's San Pablo Road campus, celebrates achieving the long-held vision of merging Mayo's inpatient and outpatient activities on a single campus.

Proceeds from the sale of Mayo's St. Luke's Hospital and over $80 million in contributions from benefactors and staff paved the way for building the $255 million, six-floor, 214-bed facility. When it opens in early 2008, Mayo Clinic Hospital will serve local, regional, national and international patients.

The hospital is being built to encompass the existing Mayo Building so patients, visitors and staff can move quickly through interior walkways to adjoining clinic buildings. The construction of the hospital will allow for the flexibility to support new technologies as well as evolving practice standards and methods. It will have the built-in capacity and infrastructure for expansion as needed in the decades ahead. The long-range vision for the hospital includes 16 floors with 900 beds.

The hospital has been designed for the comfort, convenience and care of our patients and their loved ones. Each spacious patient room, most of which will be private, will have a large window to provide natural light and feature residential décor and accommodations for family members to stay overnight.

Patient rooms will be located on only one side of extra wide halls to make for quieter surroundings. Rooms on each floor will cluster around a central nursing station in a "racetrack" configuration to improve caregiver access and communication. Strategically placed workstations next to each patient room will position caregivers even closer to their patients.

The entire hospital will be pre-wired so monitoring of vital signs can be done at the patient's bedside. This will allow many patients to be cared for by nurses with expertise in their specific health condition, rather than be moved to a dedicated monitoring unit.

The hospital's operating facilities will be equipped with state-of-the art technology that will enable surgeons to develop and perform innovative procedures that are less invasive, more economical and more effective. The surgical suite will contain 16 oversized operating rooms for inpatient procedures. They will be built around a sterile core, through which staff will receive instruments and supplies. The six existing operating rooms in the Mayo Building will continue to be used for a total of 22 operating rooms on campus.

The hospital will include a helicopter landing pad and emergency department. In addition, Mayo's transplant programs, which include blood and marrow, liver, pancreas, kidney, heart and lung, will be located in specially designed areas.

The hospital will be equipped with computerized systems to speed the flow of decision-making information to medical professionals and improve the quality of care. Mayo Clinic's electronic medical record and filmless, computerized radiology systems will provide up-to-the-minute information and fully integrate with electronic information in the clinic buildings.

Supporting Mayo's commitment to education, the hospital will have innovative facilities for patient education as well as continuing education for medical staff and the training of residents. Classrooms and conference rooms will be equipped with the latest computer technology and satellite capabilities. The hospital will enable Mayo Clinic to apply significant research discoveries to the care and treatment of patients. The practice of "bench-to-bedside" medicine will be significantly enhanced once a hospital is within steps of Mayo's research buildings.

— 30 —

###

To obtain the latest news releases from Mayo Clinic, go to www.mayoclinic.org/news. MayoClinic.com is available as a resource for your health stories.