Hundreds of VCU Medical Center employees had something to say about how the new Critical Care Hospital should look and operate.

The result, officials say, is a facility with some of the most advanced features for patient care and safety, employee efficiency and medical education.

The $192 million hospital will be dedicated tomorrow, and in the coming days patients will be moved into the 15-level hospital sandwiched between the visitor parking garage and Main Hospital.

The new hospital has 232 single-patient rooms, an expanded and updated burn center, 10 new operating rooms, a neonatal intensive care floor with 32 private rooms and four double rooms for twins, plus intensive care floors dedicated to neurosurgery, cardiology, trauma, respiratory and oncology.

"One of the goals was to reduce patient transfers," said Bob Reardon, chief facility officer for the VCU Health System.

"We have to transfer patients a lot. The number one reason you transfer a patient right now in Main [Hospital] is when the patient comes in and needs dialysis. We have to go around and find a room set up to do dialysis. What we did here, we made every single room capable of dialysis."

Having mostly single-patient rooms also means fewer transfers because of trying to match up patient gender, as is the case with double rooms.

"A lot of untoward events can happen" with transfers, said Dr. Sheldon Retchin, chief executive officer of the VCU Health System. "We're trying to reduce the level of infections acquired in a hospital to the lowest, maybe in America, to become the safest health system in America."

Reardon said VCU senior leaders visited 18 hospitals before design work started on the facility. On the intensive care floors, every seven rooms has a nurses station. The head walls in the rooms where various gases and equipment are connected have enough slots to meet current and future needs. Staff and patients have elevators separate from visitor elevators. Rooms for gastric-bypass weight-loss surgery patients have larger doors and furniture. Some enhanced ICU rooms have equipment connections on movable booms instead of on the wall so that procedures can be done in patient rooms.

"In contemporary hospitals, you have rooms that are ICU, step down, or normal rooms, then an operating room," said Retchin. "You don't have rooms with more flexibility, where we don't want to bring patients to the operating room for a minor procedure but we have no choice. In this case, we will have some flexibility in choice to protect the patient."