Winter 2004 Newsletter: The University of Chicago
Comer Children’s Hospital - A milestone is on the horizon.

Article by:
Dr. Herbert T. Abelson
George M. Eisenberg Professor
Chairman, Department of Pediatrics
University of Chicago Children’s Hospital

In the fall of 2004, the new University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital will open a new era of state-of-the-art care for children. The new Children’s Hospital is the third in a distinguished lineage from the original Bobs Roberts Memorial Hospital for Children, which first opened in 1930 to the Wyler Children’s Hospital, which opened on its present site in 1966, to this new stunning achievement, which will be our next children’s hospital in 2004. The extraordinary support from Gary and Frances Comer galvanized our effort to create a new facility, which embodies in its construction and philosophy the best current approaches to caring for children and their families. From greatly enlarged patient rooms that will also provide comfortable sleeping amenities for families, to state-of-the-art information systems in patient rooms, to laundry and kitchen facilities, to private consultative and reflective spaces, to separate additional sleeping facilities for parents of neonates, to healing gardens and playgrounds, to an integrated arts program and the latest in video technology and information processing, the new Comer Children’s Hospital will be different in these obvious and other subtle and incalculable ways from our current children’s hospital. Our philosophy of familycentered, kid-friendly care will focus on patient and family needs in all medical decisions.

The new Comer Children’s Hospital will be the standardbearer in the Chicago area. It will be not only world-class, but also best-in-class. The new Hospital will help us reach out to our local community, where appropriate health care often takes a back seat to thoughts about adequate housing, food, nutrition, safety, and a myriad of other issues. It will also be a beacon of light and hope - not just to the south side of Chicago, but to our region, our country and the world - for those pediatric patients and their families whose specific needs can be best addressed by our pediatric medical and surgical specialists.

Our goal has always been to have exemplary clinical programs driven by the very best pediatric research in a training and teaching environment that, altogether, would elevate our programs to premier status. We have consistently articulated a vision for our new Children’s Hospital and pediatric programs that would make us locally dominant and nationally prominent. The commitment to building our Children’s Hospital galvanized the interest of many extraordinary physicians that wanted to join in this effort. With their help, we have transformed the critical aspects of the Department that lead to greatness - our clinical programs, our teaching programs and our research.

The new Comer Children’s Hospital will be a winner. It will embody every element of greatness, from its construction and amenities to its programs and people. It will position us at the Forefront of Medicine for Kids. The 242,000 squarefoot, 155-bed, seven-story facility will provide an ultra-modern yet childfriendly setting for all inpatient children’s health services at the University of Chicago. Incorporating a pediatric faculty of over 130 doctors, the Hospital will have nationally recognized programs in general pediatrics, cardiology, neurology, neonatology, endocrinology, hematology/ oncology, transplantation, procedures such as minimally invasive surgery, and other medical and surgical specialties. The Hospital was designed not just by architects and health care providers but also by current and former patients, who contributed features that will bring many of the comforts of home into the hospital.

The Comer Children’s Hospital will be built one block north of the current children’s hospital, which, at 95,000 square feet, is less than half the size of the new facility.

Three hundred fifty-four feet long and 133 feet wide, the Comer Children’s Hospital will dominate most of the block, filling one side of Maryland Avenue from 57th to 58th Streets. Bridges, tunnels and walkways will connect it to the Bernard Mitchell Hospital, an adult inpatient facility, the Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine, which houses the pediatric specialty clinics, and the nearby Ronald McDonald House, which provides affordable housing for the families of pediatric patients.

The new hospital will provide the optimal setting for the rapidly advancing technologies of pediatric medicine. It will include two 30-bed medical/surgical units, predominantly private rooms. It will include a two-story, 30-bed pediatric intensive care unit, more than twice the capacity of the current unit, with more space for each bed. The current 55-bed neonatal intensive care unit, already one of the largest in the Midwest, will expand to 65 beds and double the space per bed. The new hospital will add five surgical suites, with operating rooms, preoperative areas and recovery rooms designed to suit the specific needs of pediatric and newborn surgical patients.

The Comer Children’s Hospital will bring together this advanced technology with a family-centered, kid-friendly philosophy embraced at the University of Chicago Children’s Hospital. Patient rooms will be big enough to accommodate family members - 308 square feet, compared to 177 in the current children’s hospital - and there will be more common spaces for families, including sleeping areas (in addition to beds in the private rooms), a family kitchen, laundry facilities, and a Family Resource Center.

Many unusual components of the building plan came from the Kids’ Advisory Board, a group of current and former pediatric patients who provide hospital staff and the design team with the child’s perspective on a hospital stay. The children asked for lots of windows, bigger bathrooms, personal bulletin boards in each room, more group areas to socialize with each other, and a food court. The plan calls for all that and more.

Children and their families will be given an unprecedented level of control over their environment. Each patient will be able to regulate the climate and lighting in his or her room and open or close blinds embedded within large internal and outside windows to regulate privacy. They can adjust the height of the showers and choose their own bed linens. They can use the computers in each room to select their own art work, play music, access entertainment such as movies or video games, or communicate with other patients.

In addition to exemplary clinical programs, the Hospital will have superb educational facilities for our Pediatric Residency Program.

To date, more than $50 million has been raised to support the new Comer Children’s Hospital and its programs, and another $20 million has been pledged to build a new Pediatric Emergency Department, which will join the Hospital at its northeast corner.

The future of pediatrics and the Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago is bright with hope and promise of new and better ways to care for children who require nothing less than the Forefront of Medicine for Kids. We must all remember, however, that our work is not finished. In order to sustain greatness, we will have to intensify our efforts and identify new opportunities to garner support for clinical programs and research. We deal with special kids and such support will require a special effort.