IN PICTURES – At the heart of the colossal construction site of the new Pau hospital center

For several months, patients at the Pau hospital have been able to see the appearance of a colossal construction site. The rehabilitation and extension works of the hospital began in June 2023to renovate the existing premises of the François Mitterrand center, and create new ones that are more suitable and more spacious. One year after the start of the work, the teams of the hospital center made this Friday, June 28, a stopover visit of the major construction site.

Two brand new structures emerging from the ground

The place still looks like a big concrete cathedral, with workers everywhere (of whom there are more than 150 on the entire site) busy installing partitions or insulating ducts. Difficult for the moment to imagine the beds, stretchers, and machines, even if work is already well advanced on two new buildings: the emergency department, and the so-called “woman-mother-child” center which concerns patient care. obstetrics, gynecology and pediatrics.

“These are the two windows of the hospital” according to its director Julien Rossignolwho is pleased with the smooth progress of the project. The obstetric emergency department will be operational and ready to receive patients from September 2024. It will be necessary to wait until 2026 for the entire building to be completed.

“There was an essential need for change”

“This is the first time we have visited the premises from the inside” testifies Thierry Mansir, pediatrician and head of the “mother-child” unit, “and it’s true that it’s a strong moment, we discover what the new volumes in which we will work will be. It’s very bright, very pleasant, it’s going to change a lot with the premises that we currently have. There was an essential need for change”.

The new building was designed to be more spacious, with rooms going from less than 20 m² to around 30m² on averageand especially rooms dedicated to the parents of a sick child to allow them to stay by his or her side beyond a simple visit, to maintain the parent-child bond during hospitalization. A reflection on the management of patient flows was also conducted, inspired by the issues that emerged during the covid pandemic.

New, more spacious and brighter emergency rooms

The same changes are found in the new adult emergency department, attached to the old one, and which should be delivered in January 2025. It’s almost twice as bigwith more spacious rooms and boxes, a waiting room and corridors, and more natural light thanks to the presence of more windows.

On the upper floor of the new building, the hospitalization department is being built, with almost all individual rooms, while the old emergency department had almost only duplicates, and therefore shared ones. Here too, the architecture of the places took into account the lessons of the pandemic, with spaces adaptable according to peaks of activity.

Lessons learned from the covid pandemic

“We have the capacity to reorganize ourselves in the premises to cope with a massive influx” explain Thibault Viard, the medical manager of the emergency room and the short-term hospitalization unit, “we worked to no longer have these visions in the overcrowded corridors with dismal and unworthy reception conditions, we worked on buffer spaces which make it possible to welcome patients in better conditions, even in these areas. waiting for access to daylight, so that we can occasionally isolate them for care”.

For the emergency and “woman-mother-child” poles, the structural work is finished. The workers had even set up tables and cutlery on the upper floor of a construction site to celebrate the end of this first major stage. The finishing touches will remain, but also the foundations of what must become the new pharmacy of the hospital centerand which will be delivered in summer 2025.