For the first time in our 100 years of history, Primary Children’s Hospital is expanding to include two dedicated children’s hospital campuses. Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital, Larry H. and Gail Miller Family Campus in Lehi is on target to open to patients in the first quarter of 2024. This state-of-the-art facility will be the first children’s hospital to open in the region in more than three decades.
I’m pleased to share some early images from within the hospital’s Outpatient Center, which our teams have already begun cleaning and furnishing. The Outpatient Center will house approximately 30 specialty clinics, six diagnostic services including EEG, EKG, Echo, X-ray, PFT, and EEG, and our Safe and Healthy Families program for patients healing from physical or sexual abuse.
A focal point of the Outpatient Center is its staircase. It features a dichroic glass railing that appears to change color from different points of view.
If you enter the Outpatient Center and take a left past the staircase, you’ll arrive at the outpatient behavioral health unit, which includes outpatient therapy, intensive outpatient services, and a partial hospitalization program for higher acuity patients not quite in need of inpatient care. I’m particularly excited about how the Lehi campus will address the continuum of behavioral health needs at one centralized location.
On the other side of the staircase, you’ll find outpatient rehabilitation services including physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech language pathology, feeding therapy, and cardiac rehabilitation. We’ve already begun installing kid-friendly rehabilitation equipment, such as a Vector body unweighting system to help children take their first steps with an “independent” feeling of balance, or even play on an obstacle course without fear of fall or injury. I think kids will also love our zip line. It’ll be a terrific tool to motivate kids and make movement fun.
Traveling up the staircase to the third floor, you’ll find our oncology and infusion center, where we have an outdoor balcony with spectacular mountain views.
As you walk through the halls of our outpatient building and hospital, you’ll find kid-centric design details everywhere, such as organically-shaped cubbies in the walls and zigzags in the ceilings. In the hospital, we’ve installed fun, colorful lighting in every patient room that kids can operate themselves. If their favorite color is purple, for instance, they can turn on purple footlights to light up their walls, giving kids an opportunity to have some control over their environment, express themselves, feel at ease, and enjoy a distraction.
We’re in the process of painting and decorating Sophie’s Place, a dedicated specialty music therapy room. The original Sophie’s Place is found at Primary Children’s Salt Lake City campus, but over the past decade, this highly successful model has been replicated in 10 children’s hospitals nationwide.
The Lehi campus will have 66 beds and offer nearly all the same services available at the Primary Children’s Salt Lake campus.
Our MRI was installed in mid-September. Our MRI scanner has an MRI-safe video system so our young patients can enjoy a movie while having their MRI.
The Lehi helipad was completed in July. It will support the safe transfer of children needing urgent care to our full-service trauma center. Comprehensive infrastructure will be in place at Primary Children's - Lehi to function as a Level II Pediatric Trauma Center, which will be the first and only pediatric trauma center in the Utah County and South Salt Lake County area. We’ll have x-ray machines built right into the trauma bays, so patients can be diagnosed and treated quickly and efficiently.
The exterior is nearly 100% complete and landscaping is in progress. To stay on schedule through the pandemic and supply chain disruptions that have affected the construction industry is amazing, and I give credit to Jacobsen Construction, our design team, and our Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital and University of Utah Health leadership for making that happen.
