A Speck of Green in a Sea of Gray
Sourced from WQAD8
Since 2010, around 50 patient rooms at Genesis East Hospital have overlooked a rooftop garden. Now, the hospital wants to build a second green roof.
Up on the rooftop of Genesis East Medical Center in Davenport, there's a speck of green in a sea of gray concrete. In 2010, the hospital built a 4,686 square-foot green roof on the third floor of one of its towers.
Dr. Joe Lohmuller, a general surgeon at Genesis, helped spearhead the project after he noticed a new Intensive Care Unit blocked off patients' views of the neighborhood.
"I was talking with a patient and her family about the fact that she had a cancer we could not resect for a cure, and we knew that eventually, it would be terminal cancer," Lohmuller said. "It was a rainy November day. And this was a very drab and dreary environment, not that the environment itself would change what I was telling them, but certainly, it didn't create a very good environment at all. And I decided that something kind of had to be done."
There are about 50 patient rooms on the third, fourth and fifth floors that overlook the green roof, which has been a popular addition, Lohmuller said.
"We actually have patients who get put in a room that looks out on a roof, because we don't have green roofs everywhere, and they say I want to move, don't put me in this room, I want to go to a room with the garden view," he said.
Lohmuller added that the green roof creates a good environment for patients to heal in.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
