The 55,000-sf Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn Emergency Department and Trauma Center, designed by Stichler Design Group of Phoenix and constructed by McCarthy Building Cos.' Southwest Division, is planned around the concept that emergency care needs to be at its best in the hour following an accident when a patient has the greatest chance of successful treatment. Four times as large as the hospital's existing emergency department, the facility will draw on the successful concepts developed at other US trauma centers and meld those ideas with cutting-edge technology, says Jim Lauer, project manager for McCarthy.

"They took a lot of lessons learned and circled the globe for what was the best of the best and designed it into this one" trauma center, Lauer says, noting that many of the concepts were an outgrowth of the medical responses learned following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. Among the ideas incorporated into the new center will be hallway oxygen and other medical gas connections that can be used during peak patient periods, a radiology suite located within the trauma center and a second-story heliport located atop the two-story center that will be capable of handling three helicopters at once.

The center will also contain three trauma bays with two beds per bay and an overhead Digital Radiography in each bay along with 22 new critical-care beds, 12 acute-care beds and bedside technology that provides a number of nearly instantaneous diagnostic tools. The facility, which will be capable of treating as many as 100,000 patients every year, is set to open in summer 2004.