Officials at A.I. du Pont Hospital for Children say work on their major facility expansion is on schedule.
15 months into work on a five-story patient care building adjacent to the current hospital, Hospital CEO Dr. Kevin Churchwell remains confident it will open in summer 2014.
Churchwell says the builder, Skanska, has managed to effectively deal with unexpected issues,including difficulties removing rock from the construction site.
“One of the major issues we had to deal with was the rock in terms of really getting to a good foundation, but I feel Skanska has done a really fabulous job of balancing the project, meaning starting some other portions early to make sure we are staying on schedule.”
[caption id="attachment_31912" align="alignright" width="250" caption="An example of the mock rooms used to develop design changes for expansion of A.I. duPont Hospital for Children.(courtesy Nemours)"]
Associate Administrator Kay Holbrook says great progress has also been made on room design where feedback on mock rooms set up for review has led to significant design changes.
"If we had not taken the time to do the mock up rooms, we may have found a concern at the end of the project where we would walk into rooms and say 'ah, this did not work as well as we wanted'," said Holbrook. "I think we have really been proactive in figuring that before they are built."
She adds making changes now is easy. If they’d waited until the rooms were built, changes could have held up the project and added to its cost.
The 260 million dollar project will add approximately 450 thousand square feet of space to the hospital.
