"The landscape of the health care of middle-hudson valley is changing now. "

Our project takes advantage of the expanding resources of the Vassar Brothers Hospital to reorganize and improve a broad range of healthcare services in the City of Poughkeepsie, and beyond. We treat the City as an open campus and include the Mid-Hudson Regional hospital, to create a continuous network of health-related services.

The network will decentralize the hospital’s program to improve the health of the neighborhood and to increase the accessibility to job opportunities.

[The strategic layout health system]

Over the past three years, health systems from New York City have pushed northward throughout the Hudson Valley. At the same time, it has been squeezed by Region health care players expanding south from Albany, just 45 miles north of Poughkeepsie. Since 2014“competitive landscape from area hospitals” as a growing threat to Middle hudson region.

Two major players named as healthquest and westchester are planning their strategic layout of the healthcare network. Both of them owns sencondary hospitals in the poughkeepsie.such as vassar brother hospital and mid hudson reginonal hospital.

[Poughkeepsie city]

We’ve started our research by looking into the income level of cities within Dutchess county, and it is apparent that Poughkeepsie is the only city that is suffering from avg. median income and unemployment. And the city has the largest population of high school graduates as their final education, marking as the lowest education level in the region.

[Opportunities]

Also looking at the types and numbers of health related jobs. We can see that poughkeepsie has the highest number of health related job openings. Especially , The Vassar Brothers Medical Center is investing half a billion dollars in the expansion of their system so to make Poughkeepsie City as a midpoint of healthcare in Hudson Valley Region. With the existing opportunity, the city hopes to redevelop and gain an identity to the city. It will offer more than 2000 job opennings,and 48% of them doesn’t need high education.

Right now, the city and the resources are not networking together. Our strategy is use job training center to match the resources with the local job seekers and increase the accessibility to healthcare job, Thirdly we will create serveal loop to coordinate the exisiting resources to improve the local life.

From the current system. Poughkeepsie lacks of community based and training programs. While many hospital program can be shared with other programs.

Through the reorganization of the programs, the hospital resources will be decentralized and be integrated into the community and training services to increase the accessibility to jobs and improve the health of the neighborhood.

[Reconnecting resources]

Currently, in Poughkeepsie City, there are many resources dispersed within the city. The resources include two major hospitals, such as Vassar Brothers Medical Center and Mid Hudson Regional Hospitals as well as local healthcare, community, and training centers. However, there is no infrastructure that will connect the two hospitals and the existing resources together.

[Loop/Usership]

In order to connect the decentralized resources, we created a loop that works with the existing public bus system bring more accessibility to the local and regional. By creating a loop, it solves an issue of accessibility between three target groups such as the workers, patients, and local residents.

[Nodes]

With the loop, we placed seven nodes that will connect the existing resources. The goal of the nodes is to link with the existing surrounding resources, such as healthcare, community, and training center in walkable range.

The seven nodes include the two transportation nodes include Dutchess County Transit Hub and Poughkeepsie Train Station to be a gateway for people regionally. The two Hospital nodes include Vassar Brothers Medical Center and Mid Hudson Regional Hospitals so that both hospitals with a different specialty can cooperate with each other to grow Poughkeepsie into a larger open health campus. Lastly, the three nodes are located in North, South, and Middle of Poughkeepsie, and in the areas where one resource lacks the others so all three nodes so all resources work in congruence. Also, the three nodes have urgent cares as a new health system to support the emergency centers in the two hospitals.

[Experience]

The worker and the local residents can be most benefited from the loop because they can not only use the loop to have an access to the health, community, and training facilities but to use the North-South loop in daily life for their jobs, activities, and routine. For example, a single mom will take this loop to access the daycare facilities in YMCA before her work and she can go to training center after working and then go to daycare to take her child home. The patients will also benefit from this loops to go to rehabilitation. Along with the “Health Loop”, our intervention will be carefully designed, based on the consideration of proximity of the existing facilities, underutilized facilities, and catalyst infrastructure. Our design's keyword is "navigating", "playful", and "opportunity". Due to maximize the usage of the intervention and transition from community to intervention location, the street design is consist of a color-code pattern and arrows. The street design will help the community to easily navigate geographical location into our intervention on each location, but also the colorful code pattern will give playful spaces, such as the public plaza with benches and pop-up market, playground, and gardening area. Within underutilized and existing space, we programmed urgent care, community, rehabilitation, senior care center and training center. Some programs are located in close proximity location based on our analysis.