Construction of the 50-bed addition to Children’s Hospital is on schedule and should be completed in the first half of 2004.

The $30 million expansion will add the following to the hospital:

• 20 beds to 7-Northwest
• 20 beds to 6-Northwest
• 5 beds to 5-Northwest
• 3 beds to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU)
• 1 bed each to 4-Southeast and 5-Southeast

The new 63,000-square-foot project includes expansion of Children’s Park Place, a parking deck on 5th Avenue South used by employees and outpatient families. Renovation of the hospital’s Emergency Department also is under way but is not expected to be finished this year.

Another construction project, a new women’s and infants’ facility, is also scheduled to break ground this year. Children’s Hospital and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital received state approval last November to build a facility that will replace women’s and infant’s inpatient services currently housed at UAB and Children’s Hospital. The seven-story, 360,000-square-foot facility, with an additional 112,000 square feet of parking, is scheduled for completion in June 2006 at a cost of $101 million. It will be located on the block bounded by 5th and 6th Avenues South and 17th and 18th Streets.

Clinical services within the hospital will include a neonatal intensive care unit, a special care unit, a continuing care nursery, antepartum and postpartum units, a well-baby nursery, and labor-delivery, surgery and imaging units. Also, gynecological oncology services will be located within the new facility. Children’s and UAB Health System entered into a joint operating agreement in 2001. This entity builds upon more than 35 years of collaboration between the two health systems.

Children’s Hospital of Alabama, a component of Children’s Health System, is the only freestanding pediatric hospital in Alabama dedicated solely to the treatment of children and one of only about 45 freestanding acute care pediatric hospitals in the United States.