Professional Grounds

Management Society

Green Star Awards Entry2013

The Patient’s ViewSt. Peter Hospital isn’t any different than any other hospital in that it is encompassed by a parking lot for patient access and convenience… however, our parking lot is carefully designed to limit the impact to native vegetation.

Evidence support that patient access to nature improves the experience of healing/ The following slide is the view from a patient’s room on the 4th floor of our 11 story nursing tower.

The second slide (slide 5) is taken from the roof of the hospital. This slide shows how we have successfully integrated our parking lot and hospital into the native landscape. In order to insure the viability of this beautiful campus experience for decades to come, we have planted over 400 new trees just in the last two years alone. When we must remove a tree (due to disease or storm damage, we plant at least 3 trees for every one that is removed.

This careful blending of nature and patient care is ideal in supporting a holistic healing environment for generations to come.

Grounds Maintenance Program

Providence St. Peter Hospital is a 390 bed community hospital located on 60 developed acres with an additional 96 surrounding acres of undeveloped wet lands located in Olympia Washington.

St. Peter Hospital has contracted for its grounds management to Bayview Landscape and Design since the mid 1990s. Bayview is owned and actively managed by Gary Davis who provides a team of committed workers and materials to the hospital on a year – around basis.

The hospital prides itself in blending in with the natural environment, not utilizing pesticides or herbicides through manual hand - weeding, and utilizing indigenous plantings which are hearty and require minimal irrigation.

We often receive feedback from visitors that there is not another hospital setting as beautiful as the one at St. Peter Hospital.

There are four major gardens on the hospital campus:

1. Providence Way Garden2. The Critical Care / Surgery Waiting Area Garden3. The Healing Garden4. The Emergency Room Garden

The following six slides are of the Providence Way Garden which is centered on the front of the hospital.

This garden includes donated memorial pavers, park benches, and tables surrounded by plants which flower at various times of the year, four large boulders (similar to the one on the slide 11) engraved with our core values, a pond with water pumped up through a massive sliced boulder (slide 11) and native trees. This garden was designed by a local landscape architect.

Providence Way Garden is partially funded by our Hospital’s Foundation and is a wonderful place for visitors and staff to experience it’s quiet and manicured beauty additionally it is the first thing that our visitors see when approaching the main entrance.

Critical Area GardenThe following four slides are of the hospital’s Critical Care and Surgery Waiting Area Garden.

The garden consists of artistic plantings that are expertly maintained including items such as heather, one-hundred plus year old alpine conifers, ledge stone rock walls, neatly trimmed grass and “the rock cairns” (see slide 17) which is meant to represent a family walking together up a hill.

This garden serves as a wonderful retreat for the families of our most critical patients.

Emergency Room GardenThe following two slides are of our Emergency Room Garden.

This garden is not physically accessible to our visitors but it is paralleled by a glass walled hallway adjacent to the Emergency Department. ( see slide 20)

The garden contains various small plantings and trees, a few small boulders, a statue of Mary and immaculately groomed mulch groundcover.

Healing GardenThe following slide is of the hospital’s Healing Garden which is located below the intensive care units on the back side of the building, directly outside the Family Birth Center patient rooms and within a short walking distance to the hospital’s physical rehabilitation unit. The space covered by tangerine marble behind the gazebo is often the space where groups can be seen benefiting from exercise classes such as Tai Chi. A vegetable garden grows in pots and serves as an area for patient rehabilitation through gardening.

The garden is made up of small plantings, expertly maintained lawn, very large boulders, river rock, and alpine conifers skirting the building all visible from Family Birthing, and the two ICU floors.

ChallengesMuch of the hospital campus is wet lands (see slide 25). We are land-locked by wetlands because they can not be developed and at the same time we are charged with being their caretakers. The wetland serves as a beautiful border to our already natural setting.

These wetlands present unique challenges for both storm water draining and pollution control as well as mitigation of evasive weeds. The campus has been designed to filter and store storm water in such a manner that the water enters the wetlands just as it would without development on the campus.

Our grounds maintenance team has been proactive about removing and managing evasive weeds such as Tansy Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea)and Scotch Broom (Cytisus scoparius)

Pesticide & Herbicide Free Operations

Given the nature of our hospital as a healing environment as well as our proximity to a salmon rearing wetland, Providence St. Peter Hospital is committed to minimizing any toxic products used in our grounds maintenance program. As a result, weed killers are not allowed for use on the campus.

This policy is for the benefit of patients, visitors and staff to the campus but places a big burden for hand weeding on our grounds maintenance staff.

Vegetative Debris Management

Management of leafs, grass clippings, limbs and other vegetative debris is a labor intensive and expensive task for a natural campus. In 2013 we embarked on a debris compost program to convert this waste product to a beneficial mulch for our campus.

The following slide is of the beginnings of our compost pile (60 cubic yards) which will serve as the source of our 2014 mulch for the campus.

We are very excited about the new program and the cost effective, sustainable benefit it will bring to our campus.

Employee WellnessA current challenge in our culture is fitness. Our hospital wants to inspire our employees and visitors to be physically active. With this goal in mind we have partnered with the local County Health Department to create two fitness trails running through wooded areas of our campus.

The following slide is an image of our walking trail (The Trillium Trail) which is nestled in the woods between the front parking lot and the street. The trail was created without the removal of any trees and it includes a couple of nice signs and small gravel on the trail bed.

Campus Security and SafetyWe have a responsibility to provide our patients, visitors and staff a feeling of safety when walking through our heavily wooded parking areas.

Our solution has been insure that lighting was appropriately placed and to lift the limbs on our trees so that there were relatively clear lines of sight at the lower levels.

Proactive management and trimming of tree limbs is very important to limit the potential for injury or damage to vehicles. We have addressed this with the assistance of an Arborist who advises us on the health of the trees on our campus and a tree – trimming subcontractor who regularly trims and removes trees as necessary to keep the campus safe. As a result of this program, our incident rate for tree limb damage has declined dramatically.

The next image is taken from the parking lot.

Grounds Maintenance StaffingAll of our campus landscaping is provided via a contract with local company, Bayview Landscape and Design, of Olympia, Washington.

Bayview is responsible for providing staffing and materials to the hospital six days a week.

The following six slides are of Bayview staff and owner / manager Gary Davis. These are the folks that make it all happen.

Gary Davis, Owner Bayview Landscape and Design

Jeremy Kline, Working Site Supervisor

Lifting an evergreen tree to add visibility to a stop sign

Jesus

Hand weeding

Zach

Hand weeding

Graham

Hand weeding

John

Tree stump grinding

Our AppreciationProvidence St. Peter Hospital wishes to thank the Professional Grounds Maintenance Society for sponsoring this award. We are very proud of the hard work of our contractor and hospital management to maintain a beautiful campus using environmentally sustainable practices – all of which contribute to improving the healing environment for patients and staff of our hospital.