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Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital begins move into new $340 million tower
03-12-2010
Tagged Under : Le Bonheur, New
Cheers erupted early Friday as the new Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital welcomed its first patient just three minutes after opening its emergency department at 5 a.m.
The unit’s opening kicked off a weekend that will see all of the hospital’s 170 patients moved from its current facility on Dunlap Street into its new, $340-million tower next door.
Le Bonheur officials and employees have been planning and practicing for this weekend’s move for more than two years.
“This has been the world’s longest labor,” joked Le Bonheur CEO Meri Armour. “We spent three years birthing this baby — being pregnant and now we’ve had at least 20 days of hard labor, just getting organized and moved.”
The halls around Armour’s office, which is in the old facility that faces Dunlap, were quiet Friday afternoon. Signs that read “tour route” directed employees to the new building.
Messy piles of gift-shop merchandise were marked down 60 percent on scattered tables and barren shelves. The old cafeteria was dimmed, barred and locked.
But a few steps away, just across a Washington Avenue still crowded with construction equipment and trash containers, parts of the new hospital were alive and others were stirring.
Some employees worked through the night Thursday to ready the emergency department for its early-morning debut. And by 2 p.m., the unit was humming.
Patients and their families waited in the waiting room. Cartoons played on flat-panel televisions overhead. Nurses joked and checked charts as they darted through the emergency department.
By 2 p.m., it had seen 74 patients and a series of other firsts like its first ambulance and helicopter drop-offs.
“Just by getting in here and getting started, you get over the anxiety of getting started,” said Dr. Barry Gilmore, Le Bonheur’s chief of emergency medicine. “Once we have patients coming in and we see them and discharge them, we become much more comfortable because that’s what we’re familiar with. Once we get started with that, it really starts the life in this hospital.”
On the other side of the hospital’s ground floor, its bright and roomy cafeteria smelled warmly of soup as a crowd of nurses, maintenance workers, doctors and administrators lined up for pizza, salads and hamburgers.
Cardiac catheter laboratory nurses Lynn Western and Hannah Lloyd were there and got their first tastes with a chicken sandwich and a veggie burger, respectively. They admitted it would take some getting used to but “loved” the space of the new hospital, the private rooms and their views of Downtown.
More than 100 specially trained employees will begin moving the hospital’s patients at 8 a.m. today. The patients will be moved via a sky walk linking the two facilities and will never be outside.
Half of the patients will be moved today; the other half on Sunday.
Eventually, parts of the old hospital will be demolished to make way for Le Bonheur’s new entrance, which will face south to Adams Avenue.
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