Under Construction: A New Building for Bradley Hospital
Bradley Hospital, the nation’s first psychiatric hospital for children, has received state approval to construct a new 45,000-square-foot building on its current East Providence campus. The project will provide new, private rooms for inpatients and allow the hospital to expand its outpatient services. The approval by the state Department of Health followed a Certificate of Need review by the Health Services Council.
The first phase of the approximately $30 million project calls for moving the hospital’s 60 inpatient beds out of the 76-year-old Laufer building and relocating them into a new 2-story building that will be constructed on the lower part of the campus. The 60 inpatient beds will include 15 for developmentally disabled children, 30 for adolescents and 15 for young children. All will be private rooms. Currently, the hospital utilizes semi-private rooms for its inpatient beds.
“By making all the inpatient rooms private, we will be better equipped to provide access to children who need to be admitted. In some cases, an adolescent boy may need to be admitted, but the only bed available at that time is in a room with an adolescent girl,” says Dan Wall, president and CEO of Bradley Hospital. “Moving to all private rooms alleviates this problem and enhances our ability to be more flexible.”
Once the inpatient beds move to the new building, the second phase of the project will begin with the renovation of the vacated Laufer space. This space will be used to expand or enhance the hospital’s outpatient programs for children and adolescents. Those programs include: SafeQuest, an intensive after-school program for adolescents at risk for self-harm or harming others; the Children’s Partial Hospital Program, a treatment program for children at risk for aggression and or self-harm; the Child Residential and Family Treatment Program (CRAFT), for children ages 4 to 12, who do not require inpatient care, but cannot yet live with their families; and other outpatient services.
The first phase of the project is slated to be complete by Fall of 2009 with the second phase by Spring of 2010. To fund the project, Bradley Hospital is reaching out to the community for philanthropic support and will also use borrowing and equity.
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