Sauk Prairie Hospital a moving experience

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After nearly a dozen additions, Sauk Prairie Hospital needed a new facility.

But building it meant a new location, which didn’t go over well with the community, at least not at first.

“We only moved about a mile and a half, but it took about 18 months for the municipality and the community to get on board with the site,” said Matt Tendler, project manager and architect with Kahler Slater, which designed the hospital and attached medical office building. “They were worried that moving would kind of kill downtown (Sauk Prairie),” where the hospital was originally.

And that was just the beginning.

“The regulatory approval process was probably the most complex and detailed I’ve ever done in my life,” said Tendler, who spent about five years on the project. “It was just a huge amount of scrutiny on every aspect of the project. It was probably one of the most challenging, but also the most rewarding, projects of my career.”

And, added Tendler, “It was unusually collaborative.”

Project leaders met weekly with hospital board members. They also met regularly with municipal leaders, held community listening sessions and set up mock rooms, so patients and staff could help refine the design and layout of the new hospital.

“Even during construction, we’d go back to those mock-ups,” Tendler said. “It was a great way of building consensus, and it leads to much better decisions and fewer surprises when you finally open the doors. It even got down to details about the cabinets.”

Puzzle play also helped designers sort out the spaces.

“We took the rooms and cut them up like jigsaw puzzles,” Tendler said. “Then we asked people to put it back together. It’s another way to get them involved and have them come into the kitchen, so to speak, and help us design. It give us tremendous insight — and fairly quickly — for how to optimize it for clinical flows.

And that was important since the new hospital not only included new orthopedic and women’s centers, but also tripled the number of available operating rooms.

“A normal hospital would have two ORs,” said Dave Vandewater, project manager with Kraemer Brothers, which oversaw the construction. “This one had six, so it was a complicated job because it is a state-of-the-art hospital geared toward surgeries.”

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