YNHH Seeks Orchard Lane Closure During Construction

How do you double the size of a hospital’s emergency department without displacing ambulances from a construction zone?

Yale New Haven Hospital is seeking to solve that riddle by shutting down a portion of Orchard Street for 18 months — and paying the city an extra $150,000 for the inconvenience — as it builds a larger emergency department for its St. Raphael’s campus.

Attorney John Knuff explained those plans during last Wednesday’s monthly online meeting of the City Plan Commission.

He presented a proposed order granting the hospital a temporary easement of around 11,290 square feet on a portion of the southbound lane of Orchard Street between Chapel and George Streets. 

The City Plan Commission members unanimously voted in support of recommending approval of the temporary easement and resulting lane closure. The item now heads to the Board of Alders for further review and a potential final vote.

The proposed easement — and associated shuttering of the southbound lane of Orchard between Chapel and George — would allow the hospital to construct a temporary ambulance drop-off area for the hospital’s emergency department. It needs to make such an accommodation because the main drop-off area will be closed entirely during that time as part of the St. Raphael’s Campus expansion project that the city signed off on back in 2020.

This same project is currently seeing the hospital construct a new $838 million neuroscience center — complete with operating rooms, radiology services, neuroscience intensive care units, and a total of 201 inpatient beds serving both neuroscience and general medical patients — at the corner of Sherman Avenue and George Street. 

While the 2020 approvals granted by the Board of Alders and City Plan Commission focused at the time on the neuroscience center, ​“another critical part of that redevelopment was the expansion of the emergency department” at YNHH’s St. Raphael’s Campus, Knuff said.

The emergency department currently receives around 5,185 patients per month, or around 173 per day, Knuff said. Around half of those patients arrive by ambulance, resulting in nearly 87 ambulance transports a day. There is currently space for around 15 emergency vehicles in the hospital emergency department’s ambulance drop-off area.

This construction project should increase the emergency department’s number of patient beds from 49 to 91, and its number of behavioral health beds from 6 to 12.

Knuff emphasized that the St. Raphael’s emergency department will continue to receive and treat patients during construction.

Thus the conundrum presented at the top of this story: How to undertake that major construction work and still allow ambulances and private vehicles to drop off patients in need of emergency care?

The answer, Knuff said, is that the hospital plans to close down the southbound traffic lane on Orchard between Chapel and George, use the current ambulance drop-off area for various construction activities — including as a steel laydown area and a crane outrigger work area — and then construct a new, temporary covered ambulance drop-off area. That temporary drop-off area will be separated by a barrier from the construction activities, and will have four ambulance parking spaces.

One lane of Orchard heading north from George to Chapel will remain open to through traffic — including to ambulances and other cars looking to drop off patients at the emergency department, via the new temporary drop-off area.

“This is the safest and most efficient way where the construction can take place while segregated from the emergency drop-off area,” he said.

Knuff said that the hospital will be donating $150,000 to the city as part of this lane-closure deal: $50,000 of that money will be reserved for traffic and safety improvements, and $100,000 to ​“develop and enhance public amenities in neighborhoods surrounding the St. Raphael’s Campus.”

Just to double check, how long will the southbound lane of Orchard be closed for this project? City Plan Commission Chair Leslie Radcliffe asked.

Eighteen months, Knuff said.

“I think at the end of the day, the belief on the part of the hospital and city staff was that the temporary inconvenience for those traveling southbound would be mitigated by” maintaining the northbound lanes during construction, he said.

Radcliffe agreed, and praised the overall project.

“Something is going to have to be closed in order to do this construction, which is going to benefit the community with increased emergency room beds,” she said. ​“It’s understandable that the road would need to be reduced” or partially closed for a time.