Children’s Hospital tower
Construction personnel are continuing to make progress on the framing in of the new Children’s Hospital floors six through nine.
Children’s Hospital is the shorter and the southernmost tower of the new Loma Linda University Health hospital facility. Floors six through nine of the Children’s Hospital tower rise from what is called the podium. The Children’s tower parallels Barton Road and rises adjacent to the south side of the elevator tower, the tallest of the complex’s three towers.
The emergency entrance to both hospitals is accessed from Barton Road. When looking at the new facility’s south side, the emergency entrance appears to be on the ground floor. However, because of the slope of the ground around the facility, the emergency rooms are on the podium’s second floor. On the north side of the complex is the ground floor of the podium, which includes the main entrance, an adult lobby, a children’s lobby, registration, admitting, the dining room, and outpatient clinic services. The second floor serves as the emergency department, radiological and diagnostic imaging along with nuclear medicine, ultrasound, MRI, CT, and general X-ray. The third floor has been assigned to surgical services. The fourth floor is the Mechanical floor, which houses all of the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) equipment. These floors complete the podium from which the three towers (Children’s Hospital tower, Elevator tower, and Adult Hospital tower) rise.
The Children’s Hospital’s sixth through the ninth floors each have a 28-bed capacity (14-beds split between east and west wings). The seventh through the ninth floors have been designated for Med/Surg. (Video footage of the interior construction can be seen below.)
Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital serves more than 1.2 million children in the Inland Empire. The hospital admits 15,000 children annually. The Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is one of the largest and most advanced neonatal care centers in the world, with 84 NICU beds dedicated to caring for some of the tiniest babies ever born. The NICU is the first home for over 800 babies each year, all cared for by more than 400 professionals. And as the pioneer in neonatal heart transplantation, Children’s Hospital has led the way in a procedure that has been performed more than 2,000 times around the world.
You can follow the rise of the towers on a daily basis by checking the construction web cams.
We're sharing photographic updates of the hospital construction work on a periodic basis. The new hospital is a key part of Vision 2020 – The Campaign for a Whole Tomorrow.
Dennis Park has photographed and chronicled the tremendous changes that have occurred on campus over the past five decades, and he is continuing to document this important part of the campus renewal effort. You can also follow his work at his construction blog, www.docuvision2020.com.
