All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg has been an outstanding, state of the art children’s health care facility for many years. Originally founded at the American Legion Hospital for Crippled Children in 1927, the hospital began a transformation to a full-service health care facility for kids in the early 1960’s. In 1967, the All Children’s Hospital that has been named one of the top 25 children’s hospitals in North America by Child Magazine for four years in a row, opened its doors for the first time.
Today, All Children’s is the only specialty licensed children’s hospital on Florida’s West Coast. St. Petersburg residents are extremely lucky to have such a facility in our city, and apparently they know it, because many very generous donors have made it possible to build a brand new, larger, better All Children’s, and it is scheduled to open in December of this year.
To make their stays less traumatic and as pleasant as possible, the New All Children’s will have individual rooms for kids, with space for parents to sleep over. There’s a rooftop playground planned, and a very cool feature called the EyeClick Interactivity System. It uses ceiling-mounted cameras and infrared light sources to give visitors an immersive experience that responds to their movements and changes on the floor. There’s also a movie theater, video bingo, and plays and other activities in the works.
In terms of care, the list of features is even more impressive. The new hospital is a ten story facility with 259 beds. Included is a 97 bed neonatal intensive care unit, twelve state of the art operating suites, a cardiovascular intensive care unit, a pediatric cancer and blood disorders center, and a pediatric emergency room. On the west side of the building, with a separate entrance, there will be Bayfront Baby Place, a separate Obstetrics Care Unit combined with a Well-Baby nursery. There’s much more to the new hospital, and when it does open its doors, I’ll get some more photos and will do another post. But for now, we can all just feel good, knowing that we have such an excellent new facility about to open here.
New All Children's Hospital (click on picture for larger image)
Bayfront Baby Place (click on picture for larger image)
