On Sunday, in an extraordinary undertaking, every child receiving care at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Egleston — more than 300 children — will be moved to the new Arthur M. Blank Hospital about 5 miles away.
The move to the new 19-story, $1.5 billion state-of-the-art hospital is scheduled to begin at 7 a.m. and is expected to unfold over 12 hours following a detailed, minute-by-minute plan.
While the exact number of patients making the move won’t be known until Sunday morning, it will involve 65 ambulances making continuous loops, each carrying one patient at a time, beginning with the most critically injured and sick children. The journey will include not only Children’s ambulances and — weather permitting — medical helicopters, but also dozens of ambulances from outside EMS groups offering assistance.
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta leaders decided to move all patients in one day to limit time spent operating two hospitals at once and to reduce any disruption to patient care. It is believed to be the largest hospital move in the state’s history.
Both hospitals will be fully staffed for the entire day and 1,000 staffers will come in on their day off to ensure the switch can be made.
About 30 additional patients hospitalized at Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Scottish Rite in the Sandy Springs area will also move to the new hospital.
Sunday is a critical moment in this much-anticipated opening of the hospital, which features several acres of lush green space that feels more like an airy community center or modern museum than a hospital. “Move Day” is the culmination of two years of meticulous planning that has included multiple simulations and dress rehearsals.
A spokesperson for the hospital system said they are closely monitoring Hurricane Helene that is on track to move across Georgia late Thursday into Friday morning. But as of Wednesday, plans were still in place for the Sunday move.
Hospital leadership continuously stress patient safety is the No. 1 priority.
“We have a plan. We have a backup plan. And in many cases, we have a backup plan to the backup plan,” said Linda Cole, chief nursing officer at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
Part of the backup plans include having multiple routes to the new hospital.
While there are no plans to block off streets, local police and Georgia State patrol will be on hand along the route to help limit unnecessary vehicles along the route.
Hospital leaders are urgently asking people to avoid the area, which includes a large swath stretching from the Emory University and Toco Hill areas to the new hospital in the northeastern corner of North Druid Hills and I-85 in Brookhaven. This includes Clairmont, Lavista and North Druid Hills roads.
The area around Egleston is notoriously congested. In fact, making the new hospital more accessible to families in metro Atlanta and throughout the state was a factor for the new hospital building and location.
While a move like this is unusual, at least two much smaller hospitals in Georgia including Morgan Medical Center in Madison and Ty Cobb Healthcare (now St. Mary’s) in Athens built new hospitals and moved all patients, which were only in the dozens, not hundreds, into the new building all at once. But it’s never happened at this scale in Georgia.
Hospital staff will start moving the first patients at exactly 7 a.m. with Egleston Hospital Emergency Department also closing. At that very moment, the emergency department at Arthur M. Blank Hospital will open. With both hospitals being fully staffed during the move, many services will be duplicated. For example, labs and operating rooms will be available at both hospitals for emergency surgery.
Patients should go to Egleston before 7 a.m. or Arthur M. Blank Hospital after 7 a.m. Sunday. Children’s other two hospital campuses, Scottish Rite and Hughes Spalding, will remain open as usual.
The future of the Egleston hospital building has not been determined, but the opening of the new hospital marks a poignant ending for a hospital that opened nearly 100 years ago in 1928 after being in the works for many years. The backstory: In 1916, prominent insurance agent Thomas R. Egleston Jr. died, leaving $100,000 in his will to buy land and construct a children’s hospital. He had stipulated that the hospital be built in honor of his mother, Henrietta Egleston, who passed away in 1912 and who had lost four of her five young children to childhood diseases.
The 446 beds at Arthur M. Blank Hospital is 116 more beds than the number of beds at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Egleston Hospital.
The new hospital cost $1.5 billion. Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation donated $200 million toward the hospital, the largest donation in Children’s history.
The new hospital is part of a campus spanning 76 acres, and the campus also includes the Center for Advanced Pediatrics, its outpatient, nonemergency facility and its Support Center, which houses its administrative offices.
The hospital has plenty of space for families to stay in the hospital rooms with their children.
Rooms are larger with sleeper sofas, a built-in desk and curtains that can separate the space within the hospital room for added privacy. Every floor has washers and dryers, family lounges and kitchenettes to make it more convenient for families, some of whom are spending weeks, even months at the hospital with their children undergoing treatment.
There are also game rooms, an outdoor basketball court, walking trails and Seacrest Studios, a broadcast media center donated by Atlanta’s Ryan Seacrest.
The hospital also has more flexibility on how to use the hospital beds, which is key, especially during surges of illnesses, which has overwhelmed pediatric hospitals in recent years.
“Even though we are smack in the middle of the city, what makes this hospital so unique in my mind is that it combines the ability to recruit the best people in the country (to work here), but it also gives us the ability to give children an environment where they can just heal,” said Dr. Lucky Jain, who is the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
The emergency room will cover 70,000 square feet — three times the size of the ER at Egleston, which is currently the only Level 1 pediatric trauma center in the state. Once Arthur M. Blank Hospital opens, it will retain the same Level 1 designation that means a hospital is capable of providing the highest level of care to patients suffering from severe and life-threatening injuries. These include severe car accidents, gunshot wounds and major falls.
The hospital will designate 98 patient beds, or about 20% of all rooms, for cancer care. The other hospitals in the system — including Scottish Rite Hospital in Sandy Springs and Children’s Hughes Spalding Hospital in downtown Atlanta — will continue to provide emergency pediatric oncology care.
Hughes Spalding will also continue to offer care for patients with sickle cell disease. But care for sickle cell disease will also be provided at the new hospital once it opens.
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