Blythedale Children”™s Hospital in Valhalla has completed the first phase of a $65 million modernization project, opening a 56,000-square-foot inpatient hospital building.
The second phase of the project will begin Dec. 6, when renovations begin on 30,000 square feet of the old hospital building, which will soon house an expanded speech and audiology center with assistive technology.
Work is expected to commence this winter with an expected completion date of 2013.
Giving way to the construction process that began just over two years ago was an increase in demand for services.
“It was very important we respond to the need,” said Larry Levine, Blythedale president and CEO. “We”™re 7 percent up in admissions and we expect it to go up over 10 or 15 percent.”
Adversely, the length of stay has gone down, which Levine said led hospital officials to build six fewer beds than its current capacity.
The 86-bed inpatient facility has a family resource center and a 10-bed dedicated traumatic brain injury unit (TBI), infant, toddler and post-neonatal care and pediatric intensive care units and a unit for adolescent inpatients.
“Blythedale has been in this spot for over 120 years providing health care and services to medically fragile kids that really need us, kids from the entire metropolitan area,” said Owen Gutfreund, board chairman. “Medicine changes”¦ just as you think you figure out how things work, you realize the medical landscape is changing. Technology advances and this is an institution that adapts to that.”
The attention to detail trickles into even the type of digital clocks installed in patient rooms ”“ a low-stimulated environment pertinent to TBI recovery.
Blythedale introduced core nursing areas, moving staff into pods to decentralize the hospital halls and eliminate hustle and bustle.
Patient conditions run the gamut at Blythedale ”“ from pre-organ transplant cases to respiratory, feeding and orthopedic disorders.
All hospital rooms can accommodate children with ventilators as well as family members with spacious floor plans and pullout couches.
The modernized building will “facilitate the kind of care you provide,” Assemblyman Tom Abinanti, D-Greenburgh, told hospital officials during a ribbon-cutting ceremony. “In modern times, when care has changed ”¦ to ”˜go take care of yourselves”™ you rejected that idea.”
