Photograph by Jonathan Pollack
The new SSM Rehabilitation Hospital inside SSM DePaul Health Center manages to look ultra-high-tech—with towers of glass and white geometric accents—without looking sterile. Inside, it’s squeaky-clean, with wide halls and floor-to-ceiling windows. The place is full of light, which also makes it seem full of hope. And in fact, it is.
“Close to 70 percent of our patients go home from here,” says chief operating officer Vickie Horst. “Some may go to live in a skilled nursing facility or assisted living, but we’re pretty successful at getting people home.”
The $23 million facility, which started taking patients this January, offers a 60-bed inpatient care center and an outpatient service that provides therapy throughout the day.
“We have patients who’ve had strokes, limb amputations, patients with spinal-cord injuries,” explains Dr. Abna A. Ogle, the facility’s medical director. “It’s a wide variety of patients, but the thing that they all have in common is, they have a functional deficit.”
The rehab hospital takes an interdisciplinary approach to such complex injuries. Ogle uses the example of a patient with a spinal-cord injury: An occupational therapist teaches the patient how to dress and eat again, a physical therapist helps strengthen her lower body, and a neuropsychologist helps her adjust psychologically. Family members are also taught how to care for the patient at home.
The hospital is fitted with all of the latest amenities, including a car that patients can practice climbing into and out of, an outdoor path with varying surfaces that patients learn to navigate with their wheelchairs, a piano, exercise equipment, and an “activities of daily living” suite—complete with a laundry room, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a bedroom—that helps patients prepare for the return home.
The private rooms’ features, such as extra-wide doorways, roll-in showers, no thresholds, and beds that lift and lower, make the facility accessible to people with disabilities, including bariatric or obese patients. There are even voice-controlled nurse-call buttons for patients without use of their hands.
Each patient’s needs are carefully considered. “Every single patient has a slightly different injury, and so every single rehab program has to be tailored to them,” says Ogle. “We have to enlist them, engage them in what we’re doing.”
