For Rady Children’s Hospital, the future means expansion. In August of last year, Rady broke ground on a new, seven-story tower. The facility, estimated to cost upwards of $1.2 billion, will house 140 intensive care unit beds and four operating rooms, doubling the size of the emergency department and enlarging the space dedicated to providing behavioral health services. The building will include a cardiac intensive care unit (ICU), a pediatrics ICU, and a neonatal ICU. Rady aims to open the facility in 2028.
“There are a couple of critical reasons why we’re building this tower,” explains Chris Abe, vice president of operations at Rady. The existing emergency department was built for 20,000 visitors annually, but, now, Rady—which serves not only San Diego County, but parts of Riverside and Imperial counties—receives around 120,000 emergency visits a year. The pediatrics ICU has been overflowing into other spaces to accommodate the number of children who need beds.
Courtesy of Rady Children’s Hospital
To ensure that the tower is especially suitable for young patients and as efficient and technologically advanced as possible, the design teams included people who take care of patients and work in hospital rooms. Representatives from all levels—physicians, social workers, nurses, housekeepers, and others—met with the architects and general contractors to discuss how to create the perfect rooms.
“The other thing that is incredibly important in this design, since we treat kids, is to have a healing environment with the right colors and images around,” Abe says. “We’ve had a neonate here for over a year-and-a-half and a couple cardiac kids waiting for hearts for over a year, so you really need to create an environment that feels like home for these kids.”
And while Rady has dealt with nurse strikes this year, research has been full steam ahead. Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine (RCIGM) is working to expand its ability to identify and treat genetic conditions. RCIGM was founded 10 years ago as Rady’s first research institute.
“We were an experiment, based on the belief that the genome, the DNA, would be transformative to pediatrics,” says Dr. Stephen Kingsmore, RCIGM president and CEO. “Our mission is to apply genome information to the practical care of children, from sick babies to teenagers coping with depression.”
Courtesy of Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine
The institute’s current study, BeginNGS, screens babies for rare genetic diseases before they present with any symptoms, reducing the need for emergency care and extraneous procedures. Scientists are aiming to increase the number of diseases they’re capable of identifying early and are already adding new conditions to the test weekly, Kingsmore adds.
Clinical trials started about a year ago. “San Diego County is one of the only places in the world where babies get that [screening] at birth,” Kingsmore says. Rady hopes to partner with other institutions across the country so more children’s hospitals can do the same. “We’re going from pediatrics being an art to being a science,” Kingsmore says
Maya Srikrishnan is a San Diego-based journalist. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Voice of San Diego and the Center for Public Integrity.
