When Hopkins Children's 
opens the doors to its new 205-bed Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children's Center building in 2012, families and visitors will enter a world designed for 21st century pediatric medicine. From its soaring lobby, large operating rooms equipped for the most technically complex procedures imaginable, spacious patient rooms and welcoming family facilities, the new building is designed to elevate the hospital experience to match the quality of the medicine it affords.
We invite you to learn more about the advances in care in store for children and their families. Tour the cutting-edge facilities that will be available to our world-class clinicians and scientists to help accelerate the translation of research into new treatments and cures.
Patient Rooms
In a Word—Enormous
There will be two expansive medical/surgical patient floors in our Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children's Center building, each divided by elevator banks, with two units with a minimum of 20 beds at each end. For example, infants will be cared for on the south end of the ninth floor while toddlers will be on the north side. On the floor above, school-age children will be cared for on the south side, while adolescents will be on the north side of the tenth floor. Nurses remain close to their patients in alcoves just outside the rooms.
Doctors maintain patients’ charts on flat-screen monitors in patients’ room
s in the NICU and PICU, keeping them, too, in close proximity to families. Gases and electrical, medical and communication equipment are at the ready in the PICU via ceiling-mounted booms, while all other rooms hosue that equipment in the headwall. All rooms are private—spacious enough to accommodate medical equipment and changing levels of care, allowing children to remain in the same room throughout the stay. Scattered conference rooms provide for parent consultations and staff, resident and fellow education. Large, public waiting areas by the elevators provide additional respite for visiting families—as well as a view of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
Bringing Radiology Home
Our new building will have its own dedicated radiology suite adjoining pediatric operating rooms on the 4th floor, minimizing floor travel for patients and optimizing access to imaging for surgeons in the OR and intensivists in the PICU.
“Our proximity will change the patient and family experience and allow us to be more responsive,” says pediatric radiologist Jane Benson. “All of our equipment will be child-centered,” she adds, noting that the suite will be equipped with its own CT scanner, ultrasound, fluoroscopy and nuclear medicine camera.
If a child in surgery suddenly has breathing problems and can’t be ventilated, a pediatric radiologist will be nearby for an interpretative chest X-ray. Then, as now, computerized radiography will enable technicians to upload exposed film from portable stations at the bedside directly to reading stations for immediate review by radiologists.
Why the 4th floor? “This is where kids are more apt to need us the most,” says Benson, “and where things happen fast.”
What You’ll See
- A significantly larger children’s hospital with 12 stories and 560,000 square feet
- 205 private inpatient rooms
- A 45-bed neonatal intensive care unit
- A 40-bed pediatric intensive care unit
- 10 state-of-the-art surgical suites
- A dedicated pediatric radiology unit
- Telecommunications consult facilities
- Oncology and psychiatry floors with separate, but adjacent, outpatient and inpatient treatment areas
- Dedicated areas on units for translational research
- The acceleration of basic science discoveries into early detection and treatment
- A healing environment that gives patients and families control over stressful situations
- Adjacencies between pediatric and adult clinicians, fostering collaborations and research
- Expansion of pediatric subspecialties and fellowship programs