Side of Design

Built for Community: Five Years of Impact at Regions Hospital Birth Center

• BWBR • Episode 64

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What does it take to create a birth center that truly serves its community—clinically, culturally, and emotionally? The Regions Hospital Birth Center was designed with this question in mind, taking a family-centered approach that integrates the latest care choices with the multicultural needs of mothers in the Twin Cities. In this episode of Side of Design, we take a deep dive into the design process as the hospital celebrates five years of impact. 

Joining the discussion are Rochelle Johnson, Vice President of Patient Care and Chief Nursing Officer at Regions Hospital, along with BWBR project team members—Principal Melanie Baumhover, who served as Project Manager, Principal Mike Boldenow, and Senior Healthcare Planner Sophia Skemp. The conversation explores the project’s vision, challenges, and—most importantly—how the birth center continues to transform care.

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Matt Gerstner:

This is Side of Design from BWBR, a podcast discussing all aspects of design with knowledge leaders from every part of the industry. Oh, and welcome to Side of Design from BWBR. I'm your host, Matt Gersner. In today's very special conversation, we're doing a deep dive into Regions Hospital Birth Center. They're celebrating five years post-construction in 2025. We'll look back at the design process challenges and opportunities from design meetings to construction to opening and hear how the center is thriving today. Joining us today is Rochelle Johnson, VP of Patient Care and Chief Nursing Officer at Regions Hospital. And from BWBR, we have BWBR Principal Melanie Baumhover, Principal Mike Boldenow, and Senior Planner Sophia Skemp. Thank you all for being here today.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Thanks for having us.

Mike Boldenow:

Thank you.

Matt Gerstner:

All right, so we're just going to get started with some introductions real quick. I'd just like everybody to go around the room, just give a little bit of an introduction on uh who you are and the role that you played in the project process. And we'll start with our guest here today, Rochelle.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Oh, well, thanks for having me, y'all. It's so fun to come back and talk about our journey after five years. I'm Rochelle Johnson. I'm the chief nursing officer, vice president of patient care, like you said. I had the unique opportunity actually when we started this project to be the director of nursing for the birth center, starting brand new, I think, in the first, you know, few weeks that we had started to bring the teams together to dream about what the birth center could look like. And so it was a unique opportunity for me as a new leader in an organization who had a dream about something different. So super excited to talk about where we landed and the impact it's having on the community. So I'm happy to be here. Wonderful.

Sophia Skemp:

We're happy to have you. My name is Sophia Skemp. I was one of the healthcare planners on the project. It was a big enough project where we had multiple planners. And I was involved in the planning and co-led early programming and design meetings with the Region's hospital staff. So Rochelle got used to seeing us a lot.

Mike Boldenow:

So wonderful. Wonderful. Mike. Yeah, Mike Boldenow, managing principal on that particular project, healthcare principal here. And I think where my experience came in was more knowledge about the facility and the leadership. Of course, my experience with birthing was more from a father's perspective. So I had to take a back seat a little bit and leave it up to our talented planners and staff or uh the the team members like Rochelle to really lead us through this. So I brought forth just some knowledge of standards and relationships and the campus itself, uh the infrastructure that I could bring forward to many of the meetings.

Melanie Baumhover:

And I was the project manager of the Family Birth Center. So leading our internal team, coordinating with the external team and the consultants and all of those things, juggling all of the parts and pieces and making sure everything moved forward.

Matt Gerstner:

Well, fantastic. Thank you all for being here today. This is going to be a good conversation. I know we've got the right people in the room. So we're just going to get things kicked off with uh talking about what were some of the factors that prompted this project. You know, why why did we need to build a new birth center? Obviously, there was already one there. So who'd like to get us started on this conversation?

Mike Boldenow:

I can give a little bit of history because I even predated Rochelle a little bit at Regions. And so at a very high level, uh the conversations that BWBR had as a consultant to Regions and Health Partners was we needed to look at opportunities on the site and opportunities for different service lines. Well, birthing was one of those service lines we'd been looking at. Um and to be quite honest, leadership at that time at Health Partners and Regions was well, if we're gonna do this, we're gonna do it right.

Matt Gerstner:

Okay.

Mike Boldenow:

and if we're gonna not do this, we might take a step back and not do OB and birthing at Regions at all.

Matt Gerstner:

Oh wow.

Mike Boldenow:

Then relied on health partners to decide whether that was a service line that was important to them. And what I was excited to hear about is I think they made the decisions to do what was best for the community, right? Because if you walk away from birthing in downtown St. Paul, you're walking away from a lot of families that need help, right? And uh I think the diversity in the community was a big part of that. And so if we're gonna do this, let's go big, where's it gonna go? The the birth center that was there previously was a little dated. The rooms were a little subpar, they were small. Um, there was other components of that that really needed to be either renovated or in this case, we just picked it up and moved it to a new location.

Matt Gerstner:

Okay.

Mike Boldenow:

So with that said, Rochelle, I was just looking at you to see if you had anything else to add, because when you came on, they had already made that commitment.

Rochelle Johsnon:

They had, yeah. And it was a very new commitment. Okay. And so I had a the opportunity to talk with some market researchers and talk about the importance of OB services within a healthcare system. You know, this idea that 70% of women, women are the healthcare decision makers in their families. And 70% of women who deliver in a healthcare system deliver their children in healthcare systems where they feel connected and like they were welcomed, they actually choose that health system for the care of the rest of their family.

Matt Gerstner:

Okay.

Rochelle Johsnon:

And so that was a good time for us to just explore what could market growth actually look like for an inner city hospital in, you know, that serves a really diverse community. We wanted to become the East Metro, you know, chosen site for care. Right. OB care is very uh different compared to other types of service lines, whereas, you know, women choose the facility they want to deliver in. They really the environment makes a really big difference to people and where they choose to deliver. And so it's a consumer-based business that we're in when we talk about obstetric care. And so you have to have incredible providers and you have to have an incredible facility, and you have to have a facility that gives high quality care. And in our case, being a facility that's in the middle of the city, we also had to think about how do we deliver care to diverse, racially diverse communities, ethnically diverse communities in a way that would make them choose us. So it was really unique. It was a really unique opportunity. I think we had a 30% growth projection by 2025. Okay. And we hit it.

Sophia Skemp:

All right.

Matt Gerstner:

That's fantastic.

Rochelle Johsnon:

So at the at the time we were really declining in the births, which is why I think the conversation before I got there that Mike was alluding to was do we even want to be in the birth business? Because the the market is declining, birth rates are declining, and it's a hard business to be in.

Matt Gerstner:

Well, yeah, I can imagine. And that's something I wasn't aware of at all when this project started, was that it might never have come to be because you were considering exiting that whole side of the business, and that's a little shocking.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Yeah.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah. So we got a little bit of background going on now. So let's talk a little bit about the design process. Let's talk about, you know, what were some of the challenges that you all faced? How did you create and manage an inclusive design process thinking about the community that's involved? And, you know, so what it all what did that all look like?

Sophia Skemp:

There are a lot of departments that we had to confer with.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Sophia Skemp:

Think about a birth center, they have everything. They they're a mini hospital within a hospital, I think is what you liked to say. So you have inpatient surgery, intensive care. So how do we make sure it is an inclusive design process with so many players?

Matt Gerstner:

Right.

Sophia Skemp:

So regions and BWBR. We were really intentional at the very beginning of making sure that there was representation from each of those departments at the design meetings. Um, everyone had a seat at the table, but at the same time. So that's the key difference. So say I, as a NICU nurse, am meeting and providing my feedback to the design, but I'm also hearing what a labor and delivery nurse's concerns and opinions on the design are as well. So it creates an environment of understanding, inclusivity, and a design that's going to hopefully work work for everyone. There's a lot of project buy-in that happens during that design process. It's something like that. And uh that was a key component. And it wasn't just the design meetings, it was uh the facility tours that we went on. Everyone, uh there's representation from each department on those tours. Um, the mock-ups, we had design meetings in the full-scale mock-ups and oh, they were so crowded, but it was fantastic. It was great to get all everybody's feedback all at the same time. Well, and they were open for not just those meetings, right, Mel?

Melanie Baumhover:

They were open for extended periods of time. I understand that you had Rochelle teams that would go in and run different scenarios in the spaces because occasionally we would get, hey, we want to move the oxygen, we want to move this item over here. And I think the the running of the scenarios in the mock-ups, even when it wasn't a design meeting, was really important to getting those spaces right.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Yeah. You know, it was 75 different rooms, I think. You know, there's 70 there's 75 rooms within the building that we deliver patient care spaces, procedural spaces, spaces for triage, NICU rooms. Like you said it really well, we always talk about a hospital within a hospital, but in our hospital, we treat the same patients in every single one of those rooms. And so while we have different teams trained to those different acuity levels of care, that same patient would get a different team. And so we wanted there to be some continuity between spaces. And we needed the whole team to hear how others were thinking about their particular areas of care so that we had that continuity. And so I think you guys were really patient with us in figuring out how do we hear all of those voices all at the same time. Yeah.

Sophia Skemp:

Well, and and that helps like if you're especially doing certain operational changes in the new facility, getting all of the people at the uh at the table at the same time helps with the design, but then also moving forward when you move in, like for those operational changes like you were saying.

Rochelle Johsnon:

So it really helped with our culture. So I had the unique opportunity of joining the organization, like I said, right when we decided we were gonna do it. And as a new director of this big team, close to 400 clinical staff and provider groups, it was my job to say, what is our shared vision for what this space is actually gonna look like? And we had lots of conversations around what was important to not only our clinicians and our staff, but also the community that we served. And it was a beautiful thing to be able to land on some really key vision words for that space.

Matt Gerstner:

Right.

Rochelle Johsnon:

We landed on, and we still train this today. So five years later, every person who's oriented as a new employee into the birth center gets the same vision for the birth center. It's a place where we deliver high reliability, which means like the highest quality of care. Um, it's family-centered and it's focused on health care equity. A lot of people don't understand. 60% of our patients are people of color. 25% of them, you know, need an interpreter for their care. More than 60% of them use some type of government program to pay for their care. And that's not an, you know, like that's pretty unique to Regions Hospital in our, you know, within the competition within the twin cities.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

So we had to think a little bit differently. But what a lot of people don't know is that there are health care disparities within that population of patients.

Matt Gerstner:

Oh, I'm sure.

Rochelle Johsnon:

That we really had to attend to from a quality perspective and from uh how they feel welcome and trusted in the care. And so having uh, you know, BWBR team come in and just be super ears open, listening to that passion that the clinicians and the staff had for the care that we provide to families was really important. And it turned it made something that is actually serving the community in the way that they need.

Mike Boldenow:

And that reminds me of something else. I'm gonna take a step way back. We also made some intentional decisions, we being the design team and Regions, to make it more of a hospitality-based service and and building. So intentionally we had its own dedicated patient-family entrance, separate from the main hospital.

Matt Gerstner:

Oh, yeah.

Mike Boldenow:

On the other side of the campus, to make it feel special. You come in very hospitality-driven lobby. And then even in the patient care spaces themselves, Regions had some official, unofficial standards for finishes and materials and but but we uh were given the ability to deviate from that a little bit because we did want it to be unique, we did want it to be a destination, we did want it to stand out, we did want it to address a very specific population. And uh I thought that really was a a good direction to make some really strong um design decisions throughout the building.

Sophia Skemp:

Knowing that patients shop around a little bit for where they want to have that birthing experience. So the hospitality when you're shopping around, you're considering many factors, but the comfort and the amenities is a key one, and that's absolutely tied directly to the design.

Rochelle Johsnon:

So we took a unique approach in in choosing those finishes, and a lot of organizations have reached out to us to ask how we did this part of the work because I'm thinking about I'm and I'm gonna just name a few people because they should all be sitting in this room talking about this project right now. So um, I think about my partners, Jessica Larscheid and Kiri Willie and Leanne Hubbard, and there were leaders in the organization before I got there.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

And they had intentionally built a lot of community partnerships to, you know, they'd been building them over years. Obviously, we'd been focused on the care of our patients for a very long time. It's a it's a pillar of health partners to be within the community. And we had the unique opportunity to go out to those community partners and ask our Hmong community, what would you want to see in a birth center? What would make you feel comfortable? Things like creating a post-pregnancy soup that is a traditional Hmong food that's given to women after they deliver. Our internal nutrition team actually went to the University of Minnesota and worked with researchers to plant and name. We can't serve any food in the hospital unless it's FDA approved and named. And a lot of the herbs that are used in our Hmong soup dishes are seeds that were brought over from home country and grown in backyards and made for families in Minnesota as they deliver. Our nutrition services team took those herbs, went to the University of Minnesota, got them named so that we could now include them in the soup that we made within our organization for families after they deliver.

Matt Gerstner:

What a fantastic step to make.

Rochelle Johsnon:

I have goosebumps still thinking about that story and the intention of full hospital teams in just the care of patients. We are part of an organization within the Twin Cities called the Birth Equity Community Council. And so we brought uh topics there for the black community and what has been traditionally barriers to them feeling comfortable and trusted in the space that we provide for them and being able to hear their feedback, you know, talking about what are the pictures that we see in what is the art that we have, how do we reflect our community and the people that we hide?

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

It's just it was all it is beautiful. It was really beautiful. Yeah. So we did we were really intentional, and it took a lot of time and energy from so many people to just make sure that we could create something that was meaningful for people.

Matt Gerstner:

That's wonderful. That's that that's just amazing to hear how much thought and the process that you went through to get to the point that you're at. That's amazing. It's amazing. So I I also hear that there's an important aspect of the design that was incorporating couplet care. And in our pre-meeting, when we were discussing this, I said to the group, that's a term I don't understand. I was a first-time dad over 20 years ago. Like, I do not understand this. So, what is couplet care and why is it important and how is it impacting the patients and staff?

Rochelle Johsnon:

I'm looking at Melanie right now because I know she loves this part of the ...

Melanie Baumhover:

I do. I love couplet care. Um, well, so the reason I love couplet care is because my first was five and a half weeks early. And I get a little emotional when I think about how hard it was to be separated, and it was such a short separation. You know, he was born, they brought him straight to the nursery, and I had to stay in bed. And it was so emotional. And so when our consultant brought the idea of couplet care, where both the newborn and the mom are cared for in the same room. So there's a head wall for mom and a head wall for baby, there's specialists for both, and they're not separated. It was just so touching for me. And so Regions has the first couplet care in the state of Minnesota. And I do believe, mm-hmm, I do believe other organizations have brought couplet care in, but Regions was the first to do it, and we are so proud to have been a part of it.

Rochelle Johsnon:

We call it enhanced couplet care because if you're in the OB world, you if we say couplet care, it's what we always do. We always take care of the, you know, the birthing person and the and the baby all together. Like we do, like it's a couplet that we care for, and it's actually the whole family that we care for. But in this program, we called it enhanced couplet care because it's those babies who experience maybe some a little higher acuity, some sicknesses, illnesses right after they deliver that make it. So we have to have our specialized teams watch the baby. Or maybe it's that mom had some complications during pregnancy and she needs a higher level of care after delivery. And so it was so cool to be able to learn about this program and then say, if we're gonna build a new building, why don't we take it to the next level in Minnesota and say we won't separate families? There's still times when we have to take babies to a really highly acute room. They have to have their own space. But there are lots of babies, and we've been able to save, I think in our first year, save about 200 admissions into the actual NICU space. Oh, really? We got to keep those babies with their moms in their rooms together. 200 Melanies who didn't have to be separated from their babies. That means a so much to us. It helps with if those parents are choosing to breastfeed, it helps that bonding to happen, it helps for there to be a whole family system, especially when when babies are having struggles.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Being a mom separated from a baby that is sick, you know, like that's counterintuitive to us. We just we don't understand that. And so it's Been really a beautiful program. Kind of difficult, uh, you know, for your listeners who are in the business, they're gonna ask, you know, how are you staffing that? How do you make it work?

Matt Gerstner:

Oh, absolutely.

Rochelle Johsnon:

There would be a lot of questions around that. I'm happy to talk to anyone about that. But there it's it's a complicated service to offer.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah, I don't doubt that.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Exactly. Yeah, and so we uh have just committed to it and we believe it's the right program and we know that it makes an impact on families, and so yeah, it was really cool to do it together.

Sophia Skemp:

Yeah.

Melanie Baumhover:

And I remember during the design, because we had everyone in the room, those conversations between, well, how do we do this and who takes care of that? And it was really interesting to be part of those discussions and really understanding operationally how this was a big deal, not just to the future moms and babies, but also to you all and trying to get it to work out.

Matt Gerstner:

We're gonna get a little bit loose here for a second. Let's, you know, let's let's let's step back a little bit. Yeah. Um, because the next question that is technically in there is uh, you know, well, now let's dig into design and uh talk about some of the design decisions and details and make it so special. But we've already talked about a lot of that. Yeah. We've really hit on that. We've hit on why you made a lot of these decisions because the it's the very specific community you're serving in a lot of ways about the couplet care and how important that is, and how about the the hospitality, how how that influences everything that's going on. So that the question's kind of kind of back there now. I mean we've walked past it.

Sophia Skemp:

Those are the big things. I think we as designers also remember the the details.

Rochelle Johsnon:

I want to hear about that.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Sophia Skemp:

Like the ceiling tract or the lifts, making sure that that was recessed into the ceiling tile because we wanted it to disappear as much as possible, as much as you can. But it's not this obvious huge suspended thing above me.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah,

Sophia Skemp:

you know, wanting to make it the, reduce the sterility of the medical environment as much as possible to enhance that hospitality. And it was that, it was the nice bathrooms that we that we did, it was the birthing tubs, it was. I remember talking about the finish selections for the operating room because the majority of those patients are awake for their C-section.

Matt Gerstner:

Oh, yeah.

Sophia Skemp:

So they're gonna be looking around, and that room has to be nice too.

Matt Gerstner:

Absolutely.

Sophia Skemp:

It that it was important in all spec aspects and not just the big things. The details mattered as well.

Melanie Baumhover:

So and I remember conversations about the birthing tubs specifically. So we're looking at do we like this birthing tub? It's you don't have it. Who has it in town? Let's find someone who works there, let's talk to them about what they like and what they don't like. Let's tape it on the floor. Yes, we did, we did um for the ones in all of the patient rooms, we did tape the tubs on the floor and we held balloons and we're like, how does this fit? No, this is too small. We need a bigger got to make sure it works. Um, and just making sure that all of those little details were right for your patients. I don't think we ended up including it, but I think we were talking about wands, right? Cleaning wands and all of the drama around getting those through ..

Sophia Skemp:

the bidets.

Melanie Baumhover:

The bidet wands, yes. And I think we ended up not doing them because we couldn't make it work with plumbing code, but just trying to work through all of those specialty details that would make a better environment for staff and a better environment for patients.

Sophia Skemp:

Hiding the medical gases behind the panel. So if you don't need it, because not everybody needs it, it it's out of sight and you don't have to look at it.

Melanie Baumhover:

Feels more hotel room-like when you don't need all of those exposed.

Matt Gerstner:

And that can really just put people at ease, too. If you know, it doesn't feel like this for some people, this may be their very first experience in a hospital room. And if it doesn't have to have all those things exposed, it can just give that more welcoming, a little bit of more calming feel for them. What better time to have that when you're having your first, you know, maybe your first child?

Rochelle Johsnon:

It's a really great point, Matt, and one that we took super seriously. So we're a tertiary care center, we're a level one trauma center. Yeah. We are a center that the sickest of women come to when they're having babies. And we also want to be that place that people choose to come to.

Matt Gerstner:

Right.

Rochelle Johsnon:

So if they're very low risk, low intervention type of births, we have a very large midwifery program within our hospital.

Matt Gerstner:

Okay.

Rochelle Johsnon:

And so if they want low intervention, if they want to have a water birth, we wanted to have that range of options for any person who would choose to come and deliver with us.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Because they deserve that. Because you deserve to walk into a space where you can feel comfortable that the care clinically is going to match your needs, but also the team is trained and they care enough to make that space meet the your desires.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

And so it was really interesting to have a team that we challenged with all of these questions. Can we put bidets in bathrooms? You know, in a lot of cultures, having a bidet after you have a baby is actually very important.

Matt Gerstner:

Right.

Rochelle Johsnon:

And so thinking about challenging just what we have done before in different buildings, you know, for OB is it was cool to have a team that thought outside the box and went with us on some of the things. And some of them we couldn't get to work, but but some of them we did. And our patients are, you know, those are the things that our patients really appreciate when they come and deliver with us.

Matt Gerstner:

Love it. Absolutely love it.

Melanie Baumhover:

I also want to say that the hospitality extended to the staff spaces. So we have our staff break rooms on the outside wall with access to gorgeous daylight, which doesn't always happen, um, and then access to the new courtyard that was developed as part of the building as well. And so the the hospitality is absolutely for the patients and families.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Melanie Baumhover:

And it's for the staff. Yeah.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah, you don't want to forget the staff ever, especially when you're designing a space that they spend the majority of their time in. You know, you you're we when you think about it, we're all at work a whole lot more than we are at home. So making it making it for the staff is equally important in a lot of ways.

Rochelle Johsnon:

It was a it was a dual it was a dual focus for all of us. We this building was built for the community that we serve and the people that work inside of it. So it was it was certainly that was one of our highest guiding principles in the whole process.

Matt Gerstner:

Well, that's wonderful. All right. So now the facility's been open and operating for five years. And we already heard you hit that 30% goal. So that's good. That's good. So we've talked about all of the intent behind the process, the design, but what kind of impact are you seeing in reality? So you've you've hit your goal, but what's that impact been? What's it look like?

Rochelle Johsnon:

Well, I wish I had these numbers. So when we talk about, I'm gonna give it in the three pillars that we talked about.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

So when we talk about high reliability, we built this birth center to be the physical space to be to match the high reliability care, the highest quality care that we want. We decreased our bad outcomes related to postpartum hemorrhage by 21%.

Matt Gerstner:

Oh, wow.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Which is what postpartum hemorrhage and hypertension are two of the biggest mortality factors for women in pregnancy. And we, through the work that the team has been doing, through the space that we've built, through the process and the culture that we've built, we've decreased that risk to women who deliver in our birth center by 21%.

Matt Gerstner:

That's fantastic.

Rochelle Johsnon:

When we think about our family-centered care process, it's those babies who didn't have to be separated from their families.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

That are now that have stayed with their parents and had the opportunity to not be separated, to, you know, breastfeed, go home all together. Like that family-centered care, that approach. We deliver birth classes in this building. We invite the community to come in. It's really a space where we know we want to have an impact on people. And from a health a health equity perspective, there's a couple of things I'll talk about. And everybody in this room knows that it's like one of my biggest drivers in the work that I do. But when we talk about health care equity, one of the things that we recognize before we opened this birth center is that we never heard we weren't hearing the voices of the people that we served. So, like I said, 60% of people of color delivered in this birth center, we were getting about a 4% rate of return on our on our patient experience surveys. Oh., wow. And so now we're up to, I think it's like 60% of our people of color, we actually hear from them. And they drive how we do the care in that space. When we talk about how important that is, we've built strong relationships with our doula communities, with our birth educator communities, with our communities of color where we want to be the place where people know they're going to be safe if they are a person who is in a demographic that has disparities in care. And so it's just really been a cool opportunity. And there's a lot of stories out there around, you know, high-risk situations that happen. And women's lives are saved at Regents Hospital. And you couldn't say that at other places. And so we're really proud of that. And I don't need to get into all of the sad details of some of those situations, but we take care of a large loss community, people who experience loss of pregnancy. We built special spaces and special programs for fetal loss in our birth center. So that if you come to that space wherever you are on this like spectrum of needs, from that low risk, low intervention birth all the way to the highest risk, potentially losing your newborn, we give you care that is meant for you. And so we did that. We had a great opportunity to do that with the physical space, but also through that process, building a culture and a and a focus that you know will allow that to happen for years to come.

Matt Gerstner:

That totally just got me. Rochelle, you you just got me, seriously.

Rochelle Johsnon:

I know this is ..

Matt Gerstner:

Just thinking back to when my own son was born. Uh, we found out like that afternoon that uh he had a bicuspid Aortic valve, uh, you know, a murmur. I mean, and the Aortic valve, that that's not changing. That's that's that's a lifelong thing. And just the quality of care that you're giving, it's so so important for people.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Yeah.

Matt Gerstner:

Absolutely love it.

Rochelle Johsnon:

And that we would see you in that space and just know like this is devastating. It's really hard news to hear. Like, how do we how are we gonna care for you?

Matt Gerstner:

Exactly.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Mike Boldenow:

It's a very personal space, even for me as a spouse, a father.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Yeah.

Mike Boldenow:

You know, I don't, luckily in my life I've been fairly healthy. But I've experienced birth, right?

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Mike Boldenow:

Through being a a father.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Mike Boldenow:

So as you're all been talking, it's hard, as Matt just said, not to think about our own experiences.

Matt Gerstner:

100%, Mike.

Mike Boldenow:

Yeah. So so as designers, I think it's it's we care about every service line and department we work in, of course, but this one ties personally back to many of us, and I think that was why it was so rewarding. So yeah.

Matt Gerstner:

What a great, seriously, what a great project to have done and to be part of. And it just answers the why. Everything we've talked about answers that why from why why do you need a new space? It changed so much and changed so much for so many people's lives. That's priceless, absolutely priceless. So if we're gonna think about the project, the whole project now, the whole process, and we're gonna look at hindsight. What lessons have we learned? You know, what what kind of things stand out? You know, what advice would you share with others, maybe people who are heading into their own projects even and thinking about doing something that's gonna matter?

Sophia Skemp:

I would say be an advocate for the inclusive design process as early as possible and make sure that that goal is baked into the project schedule.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Sophia Skemp:

Because if you try and add it later, I think you're gonna get some pushback because it most likely could extend the schedule. So it would be harder to do. So it pays off early and often to get all of those different departments at the table and and advocate for themselves. So it's about communication. And when you have so many different departments at the table, communication is key, especially amongst the people that, like we mentioned earlier, are actually going to be working in the space and living there and spending the majority of their life there, you know, while we get to leave, you know, it matters.

Matt Gerstner:

Absolutely. I mean, I I can totally see your point because if you can bring in one department and you can sit down and you can talk and you can figure out what they want to do and what works for them, and then they leave, and then another department comes in and you talk about what they want to do and what they you know, how it's gonna work for them.

Speaker 1:

Which is usually typical. Right.

Matt Gerstner:

But if you don't get them talking to each other, you can't necessarily, as us as the designers, can't figure out what's exactly gonna be the best way for them to work. Yeah. But they can figure out what's gonna be the best way for them to work if they're together. I love that. I love that.

Sophia Skemp:

It's better than meeting minutes.

Melanie Baumhover:

Let's just get them in the room together. Well, and I think in the room is important because if I think about how our practice has evolved through COVID, we do a lot of virtual meetings, and I think large meetings virtually, you get people who check out. They turn off their camera, they're doing something else, they're reading their emails, they're not paying attention. And if you are going to start that inclusive design process, have a lot of people together, you need to physically be in the room because people will get distracted if they're virtual.

Rochelle Johsnon:

As an operator for me, this is the fifth design project I've been a part of lots of different places. So this was this one kind of plopped. Um, it was the fourth one that I'd been a part of. And I think the difference I've seen through those projects is this one had a clear vision for what it what we wanted it to be. We spent a lot of time talking about guiding principles, a lot of time around the populations that we served. And I think that's um time well spent for operational teams. Make sure you have a clear understanding of what's needed, what you want to impact with the project. And then if you have a really collaborative design team, that will translate. And if you have to have meetings that are separated by department, if you have those guiding principles, if you have that vision set, that probably will keep you a little closer connected than not having that.

Mike Boldenow:

So it's a level set. And with many of our clients and projects, we the the vision and goals is important to keep everybody's priorities in order.

Matt Gerstner:

Yeah.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Yeah.

Mike Boldenow:

Because it's people get excited and people want everything. People feel like they need everything.

Matt Gerstner:

Oh yeah.

Mike Boldenow:

But always going back to those guiding principles that we had worked on together with leadership always kind of brought us back to say, how does this measure up to those priorities? So..

Rochelle Johsnon:

That's right.

Mike Boldenow:

Kept us on the straight road.

Matt Gerstner:

Perfect.

Mike Boldenow:

Kept us on track.

Matt Gerstner:

So there's we've we've covered a lot of ground today and talked about a fantastic project. Is there anything that we haven't touched on today that maybe you'd want to talk about?

Rochelle Johsnon:

We built training spaces within that building for team dynamics and team communication and quality training, simulations. Like yeah, there was there's probably a lot more we could talk about.

Mike Boldenow:

Yeah.

Matt Gerstner:

But we're running out of time, so we're gonna have to have you back.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Yeah, I would be happy to come back.

Matt Gerstner:

So I'm just gonna wrap it up. And I'm just gonna say we did cover a lot of ground today, and we've talked about a fantastic project that, as you Rochelle said, is saving lives, saving women's lives. And I can't thank you all enough for being here, making the time to have this conversation today, and happy anniversary to the entire region's team. Five years and going strong.

Rochelle Johsnon:

To all of us, happy anniversary,

Melanie Baumhover:

Happy anniversary.

Matt Gerstner:

Thank you all.

Rochelle Johsnon:

Thanks, Matt. Thanks.

Matt Gerstner:

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Matthew Gerstner

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