The steel structure has been completed with the final beam being hoisted into place recently for the Elizabeth Seton Children’s young adult center at the site of the former St. Agnes Hospital on North Street in White Plains. The new center will serve young adults ages 18 to 35 with complex medical needs.
“Our young adult center is revolutionary. It will change the landscape of health care and set the bar for all that will follow,” said Pat Tursi, CEO of Elizabeth Seton Children’s.
Elizabeth Seton Children’s has facilities in Yonkers as well as White Plains. Elizabeth Seton Children’s School provides education in both Seton’s residential center and in community settings for children with medically complex conditions. Its Rehabilitation Center offers physical, occupational and speech therapies along with medical specialties and care coordination services.
Elizabeth Seton explains that medical advances now enable more individuals with complex medical issues to thrive past their childhood and teenage years and into adulthood. Pediatric placement for young people with complex medical issues ends at age 21 and many people who live into adulthood face being placed in a geriatric nursing home that may be unsuited to provide the specialized medical and emotional care that they need. Seton’s new facility is designed to change that.
Elizabeth Seton anticipates that the new center will open in early 2028. The new five-story building would include 111,000 square feet and would have a courtyard and rooftop gardens. It would hold 96 patient beds.
When it applied to the City of White Plains for the necessary approvals to construct the new facility Elizabeth Seton said that the center would generate 300 full-time jobs, including more than 150 in nursing. The construction is being handled by EW Howell Construction Group and the architect is E4H Environments for Health Architecture.
Tursi had told Westfair’s Westchester County Business Journal that Elizabeth Seton cares for young people “with some of the most severe medically complex conditions and diagnoses, many from birth, and many can be genetic disorders. Most of our kids are in wheelchairs, strollers if very young, and graduate and continue to have their independence through their mobility devices.”
She described the new facility as one that will have national attention as a pilot that would set a standard of excellence and care and develop protocols to meet the young adults’ needs.
