Nemours Children’s Hospital

Nemours Children’s Hospital

The building is highly integrated with its site. Outdoor spaces for relaxation and active play include landscaped rooftop terraces, interactive water features, a discovery garden and an outdoor community stage for live performances. Patient rooms feature colorful, changeable LED lights and can be seen by airport visitors. Service functions, located in the basement, ensure they do not intersect the paths of patients and families. The hospital’s 24-hour visiting policy led to design strategies, including patient rooms with overnight accommodations for parents, laundry, and concierge desk in the lobby of each patient floor. Lounges and playrooms give access to outdoor spaces for respite and active recreation.

The 60-acre greenfield site has little vegetation and high water table. In response, a curving ramp raises the entry drive one level, allowing the daylight basement to accommodate service functions. This curving gesture continues through and out the back of the building where it slowly returns to grade. Rainwater drains from rooftops and site into bioswales and retention ponds. Extensive solar studies maximized shaded outdoor spaces and determined the design and placement of shading devices that block direct sunlight, admitting natural light to the interior. The project has won LEED Gold certification.

The alignment of outpatient and inpatient care on each level of a single building, according to each specialty, resulted in the shape and form of the building. For child patients, anxiety of a hospital admission is allayed by prior familiarity with caregivers and the close presence of family members. For family members, comforting amenities and spaces where siblings can play allow uninterrupted attentiveness to the patient. For clinicians, there is seamless cross-training from outpatient and inpatient care that enables a consistent team for visits and inpatient stays, encouraging familiarity and trust between them and the patient and family.

Children’s hospitals and clinics are seeing a significant increase in patients with chronic illnesses, and it is rapidly becoming a costly healthcare dilemma in need of a strategy. During the design process for a new Children’s Health campus, we collaborated with a team of nurses to promote an entirely new idea to the hospital leadership: a department called “Kids Track” that focuses exclusively on kids with chronic illnesses, such as Cystic Fibrosis, Obesity, Diabetes, Sickle Cell and Asthma, with the goal of better managing these illnesses and keeping kids out of the hospital.   Designed as part clinic and part “teen lounge” – it’s a cool place to stay well.