Doster recently began working on renovations to UAB Hospital Highlands in downtown Birmingham. The 3,500 square foot renovation will convert the existing sports medicine gym to seven new exam rooms. The exam rooms were modeled after the exam rooms that were recently completed at the new Whitaker Clinic of UAB Hospital. Doster worked with the same owner and design team, UAB Health Services Foundation and Gresham, Smith & Partners of Birmingham, on both projects.
Doster, along with the design team at Gresham Smith and Partners, constructed full scale mock-ups of the clinic exam room spaces on the Whitaker Clinic project to allow doctors and staff to better visualize their future working space. This allowed for modifications to be made to benefit the work flow for both doctors and nurse staff. The mock-ups were constructed of light weight sign board and light gauge metal studs. Doster was able to make quick field modifications during the walk through to expedite the design and review process.
Thalia Baker, UAB Medicine’s Executive Director of Primary Care & Development said about the Whitaker Clinic mock-ups, “Doster suggested that we create a ‘mock’ exam room and work team space in a vacant building near our site. The Doster team created this mock area and led every level of our care teams through the mock area to collect feedback. Doster also edited the mock area as we progressed to give team members a real-life feel for how counter height, exam space, door width, etc., would really function in our new space. Without this effort, which I know required much of their team’s time, our final space would never be as pleasing to our clinical team as it is today. Several of our staff actually submitted this work to professional associations on the clinical side for presentation at national meetings.”
Doster has had a presence in the Birmingham healthcare market since their founding in 1969, and have worked on every major healthcare campus in the city. Currently, they are working on the UAB Hospital Highlands, UAB Hospital, Children’s of Alabama, The Kirklin Clinic, and Princeton Baptist Medical Center campuses. Doster is consistently ranked by Modern Healthcare as one of the nation’s top contractors.
Read more about this project on BBJ, Business Alabama, Alabama Construction News, and American Towns.