Children’s Hospital of Orange County recently gave a preview of its new $560 million, seven-story patient tower, which is expected to open for service in phases between now and April.
“All services are under one roof,” said Kimberly Chavalas Cripe, CHOC’s chief executive, as she and other hospital executives led a Jan. 29 media tour. “It will triple the size of our organization.”
The lineup of services includes the county’s first dedicated pediatric emergency department, advanced operating rooms, cardiac care, oncology, pathology, laboratory and imaging.
CHOC will start operations with the facility’s laboratory and family services, which includes a staff of “child life specialists” to help patients and their families adjust to hospital settings.
Emergency Department
Other services will follow, with the last segment—the Julia and George Argyros Emergency Department—slated to open at the end of March. The emergency department, which will open with 31 beds, is named for the longtime Orange County philanthropists, who donated more than $5 million for the new patient tower.
The new building is 426,000 square feet overall and will be named for retired entrepreneur Bill Holmes, who founded Anaheim-based L.A. Spas in 1980 and sold it in 2004.
Holmes gave $27 million to the hospital at the end of January. He had earlier pledged $200,000 to CHOC, a gift that will have
one of the private patient rooms at the hospital’s Hyundai Cancer Institute named after him.
Future Growth
The institute has 28 private rooms, a four-crib room for babies, and a “rainbow room” that serves terminally ill children and their families.
The Newport Beach office of St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. was the general contractor. Houston-based FKP Architects designed the tower.
CHOC has decorated the tower’s interiors with images from nature, including fossils, depictions of undersea life, the beach, bugs and flowers, and birds and sky. The tower’s fourth, sixth and seventh floors remain unoccupied and available for future growth.
―Vita Reed, with photos by Laurel Hungerford