Grace Borsari: What Private Hospital Rooms Change for Patients and Care Teams

Grace Borsari is a Bellingham, Washington entrepreneur, aviator, and philanthropist who founded and led Altair Advanced Industries, Inc., a company that developed backup power systems for the cable television, broadband, and communications sectors. Under her leadership, Altair grew from a small team into a workforce of more than 450 employees in Whatcom County alone and roughly 1,000 employees worldwide, earning her a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Whatcom Business Alliance in 2019. Originally from Bern, Switzerland, Grace Borsari began her career as a photographer before relocating to North America, where she also became a certified ski instructor and a licensed pilot of both airplanes and helicopters. She continues to support education and philanthropy, including scholarship opportunities for women in technical fields, and remains involved in renewable energy initiatives. Her connection to major facility investments, including hospital construction projects, reflects her ongoing commitment to community infrastructure and care.

PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center’s Peter Paulsen Pavilion connects Fred Kaiser and Grace Borsari’s $10 million gift to a facility project that includes private rooms.

PeaceHealth describes universal private rooms as part of the project, along with expanded capacity and Women’s and Children’s Services. The practical question is what a private room changes once a patient, family, and care team are using the space.

A private hospital room means one patient occupies the room instead of sharing it with another patient. The room itself does not treat illness. It gives the hospital a care setting that affects privacy, rest, infection-control planning, family communication, and bedside work.

Privacy starts with hospital interactions that involve sharing sensitive information. A patient may need to discuss symptoms, test results, pain, medication, or personal concerns with a care team.

A private room gives staff a setting with fewer unrelated listeners during bedside discussion, while privacy rules still control health information and family disclosures.

Hospitals also use private rooms when patient placement matters for infection-control planning. Infection control covers taking steps that reduce the spread of germs, including hand hygiene, the use of protective equipment, cleaning, and separation when needed.

A private room lets staff place a patient in a single-patient space when precautions call for separation and staff have an available room. That placement decision supports clinical judgment while staff continue the precautions required for all patient care.

Cleaning gives that room another operational role after occupancy. Hospital teams clean high-touch surfaces, patient areas, equipment, floors, and other room features before the next patient uses the space.

Cleaning protocols also account for room layout, equipment, patient risk, and different requirements when transmission-based precautions apply. That work gives staff a repeatable process instead of an informal reset.

Rest adds another reason to look beyond the word “private.” Patients can lose sleep in hospitals because of visitors, alarms, conversations, equipment, and care activity.

Noise ranked as the most disruptive sleep factor in one hospital sleep study, and shared rooms produced more poor-sleep reports than single rooms. A private room keeps another patient’s visitors, conversations, equipment, and care activity outside the patient’s immediate room space, while staff still manage other noise and interruptions.

Family participation serves a different purpose from private clinical discussion. Relatives may need to hear instructions, ask follow-up questions, confirm home-care needs, and understand support after discharge.

A private room gives those conversations a defined bedside setting without placing another patient inside the same discussion. That matters when families participate in care planning and discharge preparation.

Care teams judge private rooms by how the room works during tasks. Nurses, physicians, technicians, therapists, and support staff need access to the bed, hand hygiene supplies, monitors, doors, and work areas.

Room planning affects workflow, information transfer, alarm burden, visibility, and staff movement. When a layout increases necessary movement or limits visibility, the room can slow bedside work.

The main tradeoff sits between patient privacy and staff efficiency. A single room gives the patient a more separate space, but the larger layout still affects nursing-station views, direct observation, and travel distance.

Single-room designs need enough separation for privacy and enough connection for staff awareness, meaning hospital design has to manage both needs at the same time.

The Kaiser-Borsari gift supports a facility project whose private rooms will do more than simply separate one patient from another. Each room has to support the next step in care, from cleaning and bedside discussion to observation and safe movement.

A private-room project succeeds when hospital planning gives patients, families, and care teams a space they can use without working around the design.

About Grace Borsari

Grace Borsari is a Bellingham, Washington-based entrepreneur and licensed pilot who founded Altair Advanced Industries, Inc., a manufacturer of backup power systems for the cable and broadband industries. Originally from Bern, Switzerland, she began her career as a photographer and ski instructor before building Altair into a company with hundreds of employees worldwide. She was named Business Person of the Year by the Whatcom Business Alliance in 2019 and continues to support scholarships for women pursuing careers in technical fields.