Christiana Care Health System will be making major changes to its women and children’s health facilities.
The hospital presented a plan to the Delaware Health Resources Board on Thursday to construct a new Women and Children’s building. The $260 million proposed building would be eight stories and cover nearly 400,000 square feet. The plan includes expanded labor and delivery suites, a larger triage room, a four-level parking garage, and a continuing care nursery for infants with health problems
David Paul, chair of Christiana’s pediatrics department, says their current neonatal intensive care unit, built in 1997, has an outdated “pod design.”
"The patients and families are really close together with little room for privacy and there’s little space for parents to stay for long periods of time with their infants," said Paul.
Most NICU’s across the country are now designed to give families more space and privacy, he added. Paul noted that the postpartum care rooms are also outdated, since they were built in the 1980s, when the postpartum care model involved separating infants from mothers. Their new design considers that patients prefer single-family rooms where mothers can be with their babies. There will be 72 postpartum care rooms in the new building.
“The new facility allows us to build single family NICUs, new postpartum rooms, and really have everything mothers, babies, services under one roof," said Paul.
Christiana plans to break ground in April 2017 and complete the new Women and Children’s building by 2020.
