On Monday, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center will cut the ribbon on its $600 million, eight-story patient care expansion in Avondale. The building is packed with medical and design innovations in the Cincinnati-area’s largest construction project since Paul Brown Stadium in 2000.
“This building was built knowing that for the most seriously ill children, seconds and minutes matter,” said Michael Fisher, chief executive of Cincinnati Children’s, as he kicked off a media tour of the new facility on Friday. “This is a world-class medical building.”
The Critical Care Building is expanding its capacity to 249 beds in rooms featuring state-of-the-art technology and personal touches suggested by families, patients, staff and the community.
Here are five things to know about the tower.
Band history
The expansion is 632,500 square feet of clinical space which includes a tripling of the emergency department to 90,000 square feet. There is a rooftop helipad and dedicated elevators to bring the sick and injured directly to the emergency department.
The 249 rooms are private and 50% larger than in the existing hospital, with more space for parents and family to stay with children. Respite areas include exercise rooms and showers, multiple family lounges on each floor, with business centers, and laundry facilities that families can use.
The new tower is connected by walkways to the old Corryville Hospital.
Officials said 410 people will work in the new building and as of September 1, 349 had been hired. When the building is at full capacity, Cincinnati Children’s workforce will be 16,773. The system is the region’s largest medical employer.
The first patients will not be admitted until November, hospital officials said.
Move into the neighborhood
In 2016, when hospital officials unveiled plans for the building, some local Avondale leaders complained that the historically black neighborhood was being sidelined. Dr. Monica Mitchell, a Cincinnati child psychologist and the hospital’s key neighborhood liaison, said the construction took into account the needs of residents over years of meetings.
In 2016, as planning for the expansion continued, the hospital agreed to spend $11.5 million in the neighborhood to improve community and child health. The expansion and whether Cincinnati Children’s should be forced to invest more in Avondale became an issue during the city’s 2017 election campaign as authorities approved it.
The expansion included the renovation and modernization of 14 neighboring houses. Nine on rue Erkenbrecher, opposite the new building, are for rent, and five on rue Wilson are for sale, two of which have already been sold.
restful elements
The building has four gardens, including one on the roof. A ground floor garden sits in a quiet north-facing corner of the building. Another is for staff only and dedicated to Dr. George Benzing III, who performed the first heart transplant at the Cincinnati Children’s. The fourth garden, in conjunction with the community of Avondale, will sit on nearly an acre nearby.
The rooms and halls house over 1,100 works of art by local artists, patients, families, community members, staff and students. Five large kaleidoscopes are embedded in the walls with portholes at child’s eye level.
Walls, floors and flat surfaces have been designed to be pleasant to the touch and easy to clean.
Messer Construction was the general contractor. ZGF Architects LLP was the design firm.
The building also does science
All 35 rooms in the new neonatal intensive care unit are equipped with lights, specially developed at Cincinnati Children’s, to enhance babies’ exposure to certain spectra. Dr James Greenberg, a neonatal specialist at the hospital, said spectral lighting can be programmed to any wavelength of natural sunlight.
This innovation will support newborn sleep cycles by mimicking sunrise, sunset and other differences in light exposure. “Nothing like it in the world,” Greenberg said.
Greenberg said spectral lighting alone costs around $1 million, but many questions about the human reaction to the spectrum of sunlight can be answered with this innovation.
Lots of medical buildings under construction
The pandemic has not slowed construction in the region. Friday’s media tour was the second event this week to feature construction projects on Pill Hill, the nexus of medicine in Cincinnati.
On Tuesday, UC Health broke ground on a $221 million expansion to its emergency department and surgical unit, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2023. The new Cincinnati Children’s Mental Health Hospital at College Hill is also expected to open.
The Critical Care Building is the crowning achievement of Fisher’s legacy. After 10 years as CEO, Fisher is stepping down by the end of this year, and a search for his replacement is underway.