Shortly after 8 a.m. Sunday, Brithany Morales, 8, made Atlanta health care history, arriving at the brand new Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Arthur M. Blank Hospital at I-85 and North Druid Hills Road. Children’s Egleston hospital location is now permanently closed to arrivals.
One by one, about five minutes apart, an ambulance would emerge from the Egleston hospital complex carrying a single patient and caregivers. Some critical patients had ambulance lights flashing and police blocking off intersections to speed them through. Others just drove with normal traffic.
All arrived at the same destination, a state-of-the-art research hospital capable of caring for 446 child patients.
By lunchtime Children’s had transferred 70 patients, they said, expecting all 220 or so in Egleston to be moved by the end of the day. The final day’s patient load was a bit less than the 300 or so initially expected, because of discharges and normal fluctuations, said spokeswoman Kelly Thompson.
“It’s continuing to go very smoothly,” she said.
Officials had asked drivers were asked to avoid the area between Egleston’s Emory University campus location on Clifton Road and the Clairmont Road corridor, and I-85 five miles away, with the job expected to be over by sundown.
It was a moment years in the making, and an emotional one for families that have seen Egleston as an intimate part of their world for decades.
Credit: courtesy
Credit: courtesy
Valerie Harper’s 17-year-old son Bennett is a medically complex patient who has grown up at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Egleston. Bennett’s not hospitalized this weekend, but the family lives in Atlanta and he has already visited the new site.
“I think it is a little bittersweet for him,” Harper said. “Egleston is home away from home for him. He’s had lots of surgeries and procedures there.
“He’s excited about the new building, but it’s going to be different. He’ll have to learn his away around at the new hospital.”
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
However, Harper noted, “At the same time, it’s the doctors, nurses, and everyone there that are really the heartbeat of hospital, and that’s not going to change.”
Harper sits on the hospital’s family advisory council. She said she’s given input about how to make the new hospital space more comfortable for families.
That included everything from feedback on the furniture — to make it easier for parents to work remotely while at the hospital with their children — to the idea for an “I-spy” themed game for kids. In that game, children look for the hospital mascots Hope and Will woven into modern art work throughout the hospital.
“One thing he always enjoyed when we were in clinic is a mural or something where we could play “I spy,” she said. “It could help keep our minds off why we are there.”
Families who need to take a child to the ER should head to the new Arthur M. Blank Hospital at North Druid Hills Road and I-85. The address is 2220 North Druid Hills Road NE in Atlanta.
Children’s Arthur M. Blank cost $1.5 billion to build. The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation donated $200 million of that, and the facility bears his name along its side.
Children’s Healthcare’s other hospitals, Scottish Rite and Hughes Spalding, remained open as usual.
Credit: Courtesy
Credit: Courtesy
The future of the Egleston hospital building has not been determined. Sunday’s events mark a poignant ending for a hospital that opened nearly 100 years ago in 1928, following the gift of another determined donor.
In 1916, 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.
AJC freelance photographer Ben Gray contributed to this story.
