As an award-winning Level 1 trauma center, Presence Saint Francis Hospital encourages family involvement in the patient healing process through an open visitation policy.  With 24/7 visitation, the parking facility at Presence Saint Francis has a steady flow of vehicle and pedestrian traffic. The garage is always open but has not always been well-lit. The inadequate lighting reduced visibility in many areas and did not convey the sense of a safe environment.

Joe Stark, Regional Director of Support Services for Presence Saint Francis and Saint Joseph Hospitals, worked with Grainger Industrial Distributors to find the best lighting solution for the garage. The Cree VG Series parking structure and Cree Edge area LED luminaires provided optimal light quality, instilling a greater sense of security to hospital staff and visitors, and delivered reduced maintenance and operations costs.


Solution
The Presence Saint Francis parking garage originally had yellow high-pressure sodium fixtures, which did not provide adequate lighting for visitors.

“When you go into a parking garage, yellow light does not give a sense of safety and security to people.  I’m a huge advocate of bright, daylight-like light and the sense of safety it gives to people,” commented Stark. “The HPS fixtures also required ongoing maintenance to keep up with bulb and ballast replacements. The maintenance costs included replacement products as well as the electrician’s time and an on-the-ground staffer to monitor the garage traffic while the electrician was working above.”

Working with the local Grainger healthcare account manager, Stark began evaluating lighting options, looking initially at retrofitting the existing fixtures with an LED lamp. But he was disappointed with the look of the fixtures and the quality of the light.

According to Stark, “Nothing looked good until we put in the sample VG Series pendant mount LED luminaire from Cree. The light output, the fixture itself, the different coloration of the lumens – it was completely different, from yellow to white.

“As the replacement was happening level by level, you could clearly see that Cree had the right fixture for the right application,” noted Stark. “The most important thing for other healthcare institutions to know about converting to LED lighting – and this is critical – you have to find the right LED light for the right application.”

Benefits
Optimal light quality instills a greater sense of security to hospital staff and visitors while reducing operations costs and delivering significant maintenance savings as well.

The Cree LED lighting solution provided excellent color rendering and illumination. Stark heard right away from the Saint Francis Security Manager that security camera footage was much clearer. The new white light made reading license plate numbers and viewing other details around the garage easier.
 
The improved visibility was remarked upon by staff as well.  

“The Presence Network News, the corporate newsletter, did a segment on the parking garage. They interviewed one of the hospital employees who indicated she felt much safer with the new lighting as she walked from her car during second and third shifts. A sense of security in the parking garage is very important to the hospital employees, and to me.  I want our staff and visitors to feel safe when they come here.”

The Cree VG Series parking structure and Cree Edge area LED luminaires not only provide optimal light quality, instilling a greater sense of security to hospital staff and visitors, but reduce operations costs and deliver energy savings as well.

Light maintenance in the garage has gone from ongoing to minimal, which has freed up the maintenance staff for other projects and improved operational efficiency.  

Presence Saint Francis Hospital also benefits from the energy efficiency of the multi-level sensor they chose for their VG Series LED luminaires, which lowers output from 100 percent to 25 percent after seven minutes of no occupancy detection and qualified the Presence Saint Francis project for a large rebate from ConEdison.

Grainger’s healthcare account manager adds, “Presence Saint Francis walked away with not only better lighting, it is lighting they are operating at a lower cost. They were able to save on energy, acquire funding through the utility company that is encouraging their customers to become more energy-efficient, and in the end, everybody benefited from this.”