The new Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas is currently the largest hospital construction project in the United States. At $1.27 billion, the new healthcare facility will replace the existing 54-year-old Parkland Memorial Hospital. Aiming for LEED Gold certification, the master plan includes a 64-acre healthcare campus and a 862-bed, full-service acute care replacement hospital. Designers wanted to create a space focused on healing while maintaining a practical approach to the use of sustainable technologies and techniques that were embedded as part of the overall design. Before building the new healthcare facility, the project team developed a full-scale mock-up onsite just adjacent to the project team offices. Seven of the most used, most duplicated rooms were mocked up to vigorously test the various materials and finishes that were being considered.

While designing the most used areas, such as patient rooms and Neonatal rooms, Parkland upheld high standards for product performance and sustainability. “Knowing that we wanted to use a wood look sheet vinyl in the patient rooms, we looked at several different manufacturers,” English says.

Test sections of the various flooring choices were installed, cleaned and maintained. The architectural design team, as well as the nurses, staff and patient advisory committee, toured these spaces quite often to view all the products and give their opinions in the decisions. Testing included everyday scenarios of the product usage.

For flooring, that meant “we put it through everything that it would actually experience out in the field including spills of the medications we frequently use, and dropped fluids of all kinds like saline solution—and really let the flooring products speak for themselves. 

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