Work Trip

Wow, what a busy week. Work last weekend was a typical work weekend. I was taken off the schedule Monday night to go on an over-night work trip Tuesday into Wednesday. Amazingly, I was able to line up babysitters so I could go. It was pretty fun. A group of us went to the headquarters of one of the major hospital bed/equipment manufacturers. It was a nice break and boy, do they treat you right when they're hoping you'll spend millions on their equipment. The food was great, we stayed at their "farm" in these awesome little cottages with tempur-pedic mattresses and our own bathrooms, had dinner and breakfast in the lodge on this beautiful property and we got to play with all of their cool equipment. We rode a chart bus with comfy chairs and couches and it was stocked with drinks, food, anything we wanted. They took us to a large hospital to tour a new L&D unit that utilizes their equipment and we sat down with a couple of their people and designed our LDRP rooms. The program they have is pretty darn cool. They had the dimensions from the architect and we were able to drop in and move various equipment around to see what works and what didn't. In doing this, we realized that the way the architects/designers had laid out the room was not going to work if we want to be able to deliver twins in the LDRP room. They had thought that we could have the medical gases dropped in every other wall, so that moms bed and the infant warmer (NIC) would be on the same wall. Well there wasn't anywhere near enough room, so we came back with plans that will hopefully convince them that they really need to have medical gases on all the walls. That way, we can have the NIC's on the opposite wall that moms bed is on. We can get 2 in there that way AND mom will be better able to see her new baby. But, man oh man, is this going to change how we do things. It will be years down the road before we're in our brand new building, but when we do move, there won't be a transition into going from a LDR to an LDRP. I'm sure it will take months to work out the kinks and bugs, but after the trip, I'm pretty excited about it.