Our First Step Toward the Future Began Sept. 1, 2010
On Sept. 1, 2010, Seattle Children's began site preparation for our expansion. We understand that this work is particularly important to those who live near us and we will do our best to minimize the impact to our neighbors. We are committed to providing you with the latest information about what to expect, when things will happen and how to reach us if you have questions. Thank you for your patience and support as we grow to provide children and their families access to the best pediatric healthcare.
Resources to help you stay informed
Our Need to Expand
If you’ve ever ended up in an emergency department, you know that waiting for a room and being seen by a clinician can be painstakingly slow. This video provides a glimpse of what it’s like to end up in Seattle Children’s Emergency Department, and why there’s such a critical need to expand this small and crowded space… both for the comfort and safety of patients, families and staff. Seeing the ED experience from their perspective illuminates why Children’s is Building Hope and expanding our facility to meet the needs of the children and families who need us most.
Meet patients, families, doctors and nurses who share what it’s like to receive and provide care in the existing facility, and why when you’re battling something as serious as cancer, having single rooms is so important – both for privacy and for safety.
Meet families and nurses who will show you what it's like to receive and provide care in our existing critical care units, and why it's critical that we expand our facility.
The need for Seattle Children’s expansion has never been so clear as when you hear directly from the patients and families we serve.
Our Crane Has a Name
The winners of the Name the Crane contest were honored at a July 19, 2011, ceremony held near the construction site. Jonathan, age 4, received first place for his entry, Pagasa, which means "hope" in Tagalog, a Filipino dialect, and is pronounced pug-ah-sa'. According to Jonathan, Seattle Children's is building a "high-high-high-in-the-sky building of hope, so that's what we should call it! " Read more.
More About Our Expansion Plan
Families count on Seattle Children's for lifesaving care they can't find anywhere else in the region. As the region has grown, so have we. And now we're growing again.
Building Hope: Cancer and Critical Care Expansion is the journey we're on to meet the increasing demand from our patients and families for more beds. This spring we broke ground on a new building that will add 330,000 square feet of space to our campus — space that will enable us to immediately improve and expand our crowded cancer wing and busy critical care unit when the building opens two years from now.
Our cancer wing will move into the top two floors of the eight-floor (plus basement) building and grow to 48 beds. The floor directly below will house 32 new critical care beds that will be connected to our existing critical care unit by a sky bridge. In addition, with the support of our community, we will move the emergency department to the ground floor of the new building, where it can expand to better serve the growing number of patients coming through our doors. We'll build out the remaining floors over time as needed.
A commitment to providing the best, safest and most compassionate care possible guides our expansion. We're excited that the new building will give us the additional capacity to begin providing all of our patients single-family rooms, which will increase privacy and improve infection control. We designed the patient rooms in the new building to be larger to better accommodate families and are furnishing them with sleeper sofas, privacy curtains and bathrooms with showers. In addition, each floor will include a spacious and comfortable family area with places set aside for food storage and preparation.
We're arranging patient rooms in eight-bed "neighborhoods" that will put caregivers closer to the point of care and make them easier to find. Rooms will have "porches" — alcoves outside the door where supplies and medication can be delivered directly to the patient. Traditional nurse's stations will be replaced with spaces where caregivers can meet as a team to talk about diagnosis and treatment.
It's all about providing family-centered care. With this new building, we're taking the steps necessary to assure families thought the region that they can always count on Seattle Children's to meet their child's urgent and complex medical needs.