The expansion is finally complete for the Nemours/Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children. November 2014 marked the beginning of a new chapter for the hospital. The new expansion embraces modern healthcare design and technology while honoring nature and the hospital’s history. The shimmery glass towers and 5 story atrium shower daylight into the main public space and patient areas and offer views to the historic Nemours Mansion site.
The Lighting Practice was part of the design team led by FKP Architects. TLP’s scope included lighting for interior public spaces as well as exterior lighting for the children’s garden, site roadways, parking areas and entry canopy, all designed to reinforce the soft welcoming forms in the building architecture and landscape.
Dozens of sick children moved to
gleaming new expansion of Delaware hospital
Michael Vitez, Inquirer Staff Writer | Saturday, November 1, 2014, 6:04 PM
WILMINGTON – They moved the sickest patients first – children in isolation, with ventilators and feeding tubes, blood pressure pumps and IV poles carrying many medicines.
A team of five or even six nurses, respiratory therapists, and doctors surrounded each bed, piloting it out of the old room, down hallways and around corners, applauded and cheered by colleagues at every turn, until each patient was safely reconnected to pumps and monitors in a new room.
In all, 120 patients, many of them critically ill, moved Saturday into a $270 million expansion of the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington. Each of the 144 beds in the new hospital building will be in private rooms, with two big-screen televisions, computer for the family, and bathroom fit for a five-star hotel.
The staff has held drills and simulations, simulations and drills, for the last year. The 24 children in the pediatric intensive care unit were scheduled to move first, one at a time.
“Losing catheters and tubes, and making sure all the equipment we need is in two places at once,” said Scott Penfil, a pediatric intensivist, when asked what worried him most.
The Wilmington hospital opened in 1941; the facility that patients moved from this weekend is 30 years old. Paul Kempinski, chief operating officer, spoke over a public address system as the move began, quoting from remarks made by Francis Gaines – then president of Washington and Lee University – at that first dedication ceremony:
“Whenever one of these children shall leap more happily from a bed, whenever the radiance of laughter shall supplant the sob of suffering, whenever the radiance comes back to a little face that has been darkened with tragedy, there today and forever will be seen the monument to Alfred I. duPont.”
Fulle Article: Dozens of sick children moved to gleaming new expansion of Delaware hospital