Hospital Breaks Ground on Addition
By Felice J. Freyer, The Providence Journal, R.I.
May 3–PROVIDENCE — Women & Infants Hospital yesterday celebrated the start of construction on a $64-million addition that will be the biggest hospital building project since Hasbro Children’s Hospital went up in 1994.
The five-story structure at the corner of Gay and Dudley streets will include 30 additional obstetric beds and a vastly expanded neonatal intensive care unit, able to treat 80 sick and premature babies in spacious “family rooms.” It is expected to open in 2009.
The hospital was built in 1986 to accommodate 6,500 births a year; last year 9,500 babies were born there. That number has held fairly steady for the past decade, but patients’ needs have changed.
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, at 150,000 square feet, will increase the bed capacity from 91 to 122 and the infant bassinets from 120 to 140. The 20 additional bassinets will all go in the intensive care unit.
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.
“This project is both a gift to the community and a gift from the community,” Constance A. Howes, hospital president and chief executive officer, told dozens of hospital and community officials at a ceremony inside a tent on the site of the addition.
The hospital plans to finance the construction with at least $20 million in charitable donations — and has already raised $16.2 million. The rest will be paid for with borrowing and cash. The ceremonial ground-breaking yesterday was performed by several youngsters who were “graduates” of the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. They used toy shovels to attack a mound of dirt inside the tent.
Meanwhile, upstairs inside the hospital, another NICU graduate was waiting to deliver her own baby. Ashley Penrine, 21, of Mansfield, Mass., had been the very first patient admitted to the current NICU. She was born weighing 1 pound, 11 ounces, at 25 weeks gestation, on April 9, 1986, in the old Women & Infants Hospital building on Maude Street. A few weeks later, patients and staff moved to the just-completed hospital building on Dudley Street, and Ashley was the first baby admitted to the brand-new intensive care unit. She was in the hospital three months and nine days, said her mother, Lisa Penrine.
Today, Ashley Penrine is 35 weeks pregnant, and suffering from preeclampsia, a condition of high blood pressure that can endanger mother and baby. She was admitted this week so she can be monitored for the rest of the pregnancy, but she said she’s been feeling well.
Construction on the addition will begin next week. The building will extend southwest from the hospital across what is now a parking lot for doctors.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Providence Journal, R.I.
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