Friday, Aug. 14, 2015 | 2 a.m.
A styrofoam world exists on the third floor of Centennial Hills Hospital, complete with replicas of patient rooms, an emergency department, nurses’ station and neonatal intensive care unit. Scattered throughout are real chairs and couches, beckoning passersby to give them a try.
The Valley Health System transformed the empty hospital floor into a life-size mockup of future settings at Henderson Hospital, the 250,000-foot facility being built on the corner of Gibson Road and Galleria Drive. Months before construction crews moved dirt, a group of hospital employees toured the styrofoam landscape to test the design of the new facility — right down to the comfortableness of the furniture.
“It was nice to see users actually walk a space and determine if something was not right,” said Steven Wilson, principal of HMC Architects, which designed the hospital. “We’d cut it up or pull it off the wall and reconfigure it right there. We had real-time conversations between designers and users about how the space should function.”
To read the full article, please visit: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/aug/14/designing-new-henderson-hospital/