Dayton Children’s hospital broke ground Thursday on a new eight-story building on its campus. The center is part of a long-term plan to improve patient care.
Officials at Children’s say their current facilities can’t serve all their needs. The 260,000-square-foot tower will house a new intensive care unit for newborns, a Cancer and Blood Disorder Center, and new patient care units.
But the hospital's President and CEO, Deborah Feldman, says the long-term plan is about improving the hospital, not necessarily expanding it.
“I go around the community and I talk to groups. Ninety percent or more have been touched by...this hospital, their children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews," she said. "We need to make sure that this hospital is strong for them.”
Feldman says most of the tower’s construction will be completed by local contractors, and the design had input from a kids advisory council.
“We started with what we wanted the outside to look like," said Eighteen-year-old Kelsey Collins, one of four young advisors. "And then we moved to the inside and do we want tress in there and we went into color and things that we wanted, and now have a beautiful tower to build.”
Collins says the building's exterior will be feature a special paint that changes colors, from blues to greens, in different sunlight.
The tower is part of a $141 million dollar campus renovation and is expected to be completed by 2017.
