Who We Are Our Home
Our Home
We built Lurie Children’s to offer the latest innovations in medical care and technology, enhanced clinical programs, advanced research and improved family amenities.
Our home allows us to:
- Speed up the healing process. Our 360 all-private rooms reduce noise and control infection.
- Treat the whole family, not just the patient. Our improved inpatient unit design and unique family spaces make it more convenient for families to visit and remain together during treatment.
- Transport critically ill newborns faster from Prentice Women’s Hospital using two bridges, allowing families to stay together during care.
- Develop multidisciplinary programs that allow patients to see multiple experts in one visit, or have access to that same collaborative team during an inpatient stay; such as the 44-bed Regenstein Cardiac Care Unit, where cardiology and cardiovascular surgery patients stay from admission to discharge. It is one of the few pediatric units of its kind in the nation, providing the expertise, technology and comprehensive resources to treat a wide range of complex heart conditions from infancy through young adulthood.
- Improve transition of our patients into adult care. With our campus partners just next door, collaborating on care and transitioning patients when the time is right is becoming smoother for patients.
- Continue to attract and retain the best staff. We have more than 1,665 physicians and allied health professionals in 70 pediatric specialties.
- Become a leader in technology. Now, Lurie Children’s has medical imaging equipment that can scan a child in less than a second. Portable imaging technology brought to the bedside gives immediate results, which means faster diagnoses and quicker treatments. And each of the operating/procedure rooms are equipped for advanced minimally invasive surgery, along with additional rooms for other special procedures.
- Expand our research. With space for more pediatric researchers, Lurie Children's includes a clinical research center to expedite discoveries from the lab to the patient bedside.
- Become environmentally-friendly. Our facility has been designated with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.
- Expand our trauma care possibilities to meet regional demands. Our emergency department includes three trauma/procedure rooms, four nurse triage rooms, two diagnostic radiology rooms and one dedicated CT scanner.
Evidence-Based Hospital Design
Many of Lurie Children's key design decisions reflect evidence-based design features intended to improve care for children. Our team reviewed the growing body of evidence that shows that hospital design impacts patient stress, patient and staff safety, staff effectiveness and care quality in order to determine which features to incorporate into the design of Lurie Children’s. Some examples include:
- All private inpatient rooms to reduce infection and promote healing
- Acuity adaptable rooms in the Regenstein Cardiac Care Unit to eliminate transfers to another unit when a patient’s condition changes
- Decentralized nursing stations to increase staff time spent in direct patient care
- Access to sunlight and views of nature to reduce stress
Measuring the Impact of Design on Healing
Surprisingly, there are significant gaps in what is known about the role of respite and play spaces in a pediatric patient’s health and healing. Quantification of hospital design has applicability nationwide with the growing interest in building new healing spaces for children. The generosity and foresight of the Crown Family in creating the Crown Sky Garden presents a unique opportunity to understand the connection between hospital design and health. Located on the hospital's 11th floor, the Crown Sky Garden subtly divides the 5,000-square-foot garden into zones. Areas closer to the Sky Café are designed for high activity and performances, while areas closer to the windows encourage quiet activity and respite for families and staff
An expert, multidisciplinary research team at Lurie Children’s is partnering with the internationally-recognized Center for Health Design to examine the impact of hospital design on stress levels in hospitalized children and their parents. The study will explore the extent to which healing spaces promote health and healing during hospitalization like in the Crown Sky Garden, and other spaces that provide respite, play and self-care.
The Pebble Project
Lurie Children’s is also part of the “Pebble Project,” a group of 50 hospitals from around the world that are committed to studying specific innovations in hospital design. Research on the hospital design and Crown Sky Garden will be shared once it is completed so that other hospitals can learn from this experience as they move from conception to design in their own spaces. Read more about the Pebble Project.
Centralized vs. Decentralized Nursing Stations
A study comparing caregiver communication, teamwork, stress and quality of care on units with a centralized nursing station at the current hospital versus a decentralized design at Lurie Children’s is being led by Lurie Children's nursing team.
Centralized unit designs typically include a large nursing station that concentrates all patient charts, computers, medications and staff that need access to this information together in one location. A decentralized unit design brings nursing staff and supplies closer to patients. At Lurie Children’s, the units will have one nursing workstation with a chair and computer for every two patient rooms and four care team stations distributed at different ends of the unit.
Previous hospital design research has primarily focused on benefits to patients, with few studies looking into unit design improvements from the caregiver perspective. Funding by the Shaw Faculty Collaborative Research Grant will provide support for Phase I data collection of nurse perceptions of the care environment within the current hospital’s unit design, as well as data on quality outcomes. Phase II of the study will evaluate the same measures at Lurie Children’s six months after the move, and then again one year later.
The results of this study will provide valuable evidence on how patient care unit design impacts nursing staff performance and quality of care.
More studies to evaluate outcomes related to the design of Lurie Children’s are in development.