“From a patient experience perspective, it is revolutionary,” Guenther says.Īs visitors move through the building, elements of Northern California’s native environment provide a sense of being alongside nature, despite being in a hospital. Families don’t have to traverse below ground and instead enter the main lobby and have only a few choices about where to go next: up the staircase or elevator, or across the lobby into the surgery and imaging unit. Reflecting a shift away from this, the new hospital’s pedestrian entrance is at ground level, which is also the location of the treatment center (surgery, interventional services, imaging, and nuclear medicine). But the practice of moving patients down into a basement level, she explains, can exacerbate feelings of fear or anxiety that children experience prior to “scary procedures” such as surgery. Perkins+Will collaborated with Hammel, Green and Abrahamson Architects, Inc. “A common issue in health care is that traditional hospital design places operating rooms and imaging services on sub-ground level floors to accommodate heavy surgical and diagnostic equipment,” says Robin Guenther of Perkins+Will, lead architect. The new Main building, which is connected to the original (West) building, takes a similar approach by challenging the fundamental mindset of being inside a hospital, beginning with the experience of a patient arriving there. Now, he explains, it is routine for hospitals to be built to support a positive psychological experience for patients, but he points to the original Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital as an early adopter when it opened in 1991 with terraces on each floor and a garden at the center. “By the early 1980s, evidence supporting the stress-reducing effects of nature was so consistent, and we understood that natural beauty’s effects were much more than skin deep,” Ulrich says. In 1984, two years before planning for the original Packard Children’s Hospital began, Science published a study by environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich, PhD, that was lauded as the first to use modern medical research to support the healing effects of nature. There is deep evidence that a hospital’s physical environment and the well-being of patients and families are closely related. And she believed that caring for a child involved the whole family. She wanted kids to be treated like kids-not just patients. She recognized the power of nature as an important part of healing. The concept is reminiscent of Lucile Salter Packard’s founding vision for the hospital: to nurture the body and soul of every child. The building combines the most advanced medical tools with a holistic approach to healing-focusing on the family at the heart of patient care. That feedback is present in nearly every aspect of the new Main building, which opened to patients on December 9, 2017. “It didn’t take long for us all to agree-a restorative space that felt light, healing, engaging,” Diane says. The committee’s meetings became open forums for input and brainstorming about what they wanted to see in the new campus. She wanted to be a voice for families like hers. “About 10 years ago, before the design team or architects had plans, they had parents,” says Diane, who joined the committee as her son, Matthew, now 16, was spending less time in treatment. They created a design committee that included architects, hospital staff, board members, faculty, and members of the Family Advisory Council. For the Flynns, the hospital became a second home.ĭiane felt compelled to give back to the hospital that was so supportive of her family, so she became one of five parent leaders of the hospital’s Family Advisory Council, where families provide firsthand feedback on everything from bedside care to food service.Įight years later, in 2009, the hospital team that was starting to plan for a new children’s facility wanted to gain an understanding of needs from the perspectives of a wider group. When Diane Flynn’s third child was born with a cleft lip in 2001, her family embarked on a series of six surgeries and appointments with dozens of specialists at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford that spanned eight years.
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