WRD Architects assisted Dientes, a nonprofit dental clinic, to expand its Santa Cruz facility by 2,400 square feet.  The newly established Helen Webster Children’s Dental Center accommodates the needs of young patients with a seven-chair pediatric wing that includes kid-friendly waiting room areas and tooth brushing stations for teaching oral hygiene.

WRD Architects maximized clinical efficiencies by studying and incorporating staff workflow into the space plan. The naturally lit OSHPD-3 facility has a centrally located panoramic X-ray space and a sterilization room to serve both the adult and pediatric wings.  As a result of this project, Dientes is now able to accommodate 8,800 additional visits a year — 40 percent more than the clinic’s original capacity.

WRD Architects partnered with Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System to design a two-story medical office building complete with luxuriant landscaping throughout the site, including mature olive trees at the front entry and a rooftop garden accessible to all building users.  The ground floor houses a physical therapy space, which includes an MRI unit and a therapy spa.  The upper floor features nurse training and administrative areas, along with a state-of-the-art clinical simulation lab.   The lab includes a control room, two simulation areas and debriefing rooms.

“Simulation has been used for many years in aviation, the military and in medicine,” said Rachel Failano, RN, MSN, Clinical Nurse Educator, Clinical Simulation/Skills Lab Coordinator, “but it is new territory for nursing, and in a non-teaching hospital setting in particular. It adds an entirely new dimension to learning. We can create specific patient care environments and scenarios using high-fidelity, human simulators, rather than patients, to learn the most effective and safest ways to respond in situations.”

Outside the medical facility, Bio Swales, treatment systems, sediment filters, and grease interceptors were designed to treat and control stormwater from parking lots.

Working with Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System, WRD Architects created a state-of-the-art medical office building that is home to the largest private primary care physicians’ group in Monterey County. The 45,000-square-foot facility transformed a vacant three-acre lot into a fully landscaped property, which now includes an underground 16,000-cubic-foot stormwater treatment system.

The two-story building includes a large covered entry with an atrium lobby, roof deck, and outdoor seating. Inside, an innovative floor plan consisting of sky-lit nurses’ station modules ringed with exam rooms efficiently links patient care areas with laboratory facilities, conference rooms, and treatment areas.