Neonatal Unit Closer to Term

By Timothy C. Barmann; Journal Staff Writer

Women & Infants Hospital celebrates topping off an addition that will expand its intensive care.

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PROVIDENCE – Women & Infants Hospital moved a step closer to completing a $76.8-million addition yesterday when construction workers hoisted into place the structure’s final steel beam.

Staff members, hospital officials, as well as youngsters who were treated as infants in the hospital’s neonatal intensive-care unit, celebrated the occasion with a topping-off ceremony.

Before the beam was lifted to the top of the five-story addition at the corner of Gay and Dudley streets, eight children donned blue scrub tops and purple rubber gloves. They dipped their hands in paint, stamped handprints and wrote their names on the beam.

The construction project, the largest hospital building project since Hasbro Children’s Hospital went up in 1994, is expected to be completed in the late spring of 2009.

The hospital has raised close to $20 million in charitable donations to help pay for part of the new addition, said Susan Hawryluk, a spokeswoman for the hospital. The hospital will use cash and loans to pay for the balance.

Women & Infants broke ground on the project in May, allowing it to vastly expand its neonatal intensive-care unit, as well as to handle more births. The hospital was built in 1986 to accommodate 6,500 births a year; last year, almost 10,000 babies were born there.

In recent years, women have been staying in the hospital longer because more are having cesarean sections. And newborns are staying longer because many of the tiniest, sickest babies who once died now survive and need weeks of intensive care. The current NICU was intended for 41 babies, but typically houses 60 or more, and sometimes has to turn away a baby.

Additionally, the hospital has expanded its services to women with cancer, and they have often needed hospital beds, too.

The new building will add 150,000 square feet of patient space, including an 80-bed neonatal intensive-care unit with single-family rooms. It will also have 30 larger rooms with private baths for adult inpatients.

The hospital needed state approval to build the new unit, and as part of that approval, Health Director David R. Gifford required Women & Infants to improve prenatal care for women at risk of premature births, to improve the care of premature babies after they leave the intensive-care unit, and to try to reduce inappropriate emergency-room use by patients of the hospital’s primary care center.

tbarmann@projo.com / (401) 277-7369

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Captions:

Four-day-old Gennaro Cerce is about to be taken from his incubator in the neonatal intensive-care unit.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

Kyle Allhusen, 8, of Scituate, signs his handprint on a steel beam that was hoisted atop the addition to Women & Infants Hospital during a topping-off ceremony yesterday.

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