Wichita children’s hospitals to provide more services for sick kids
With the expansion of Children’s Mercy Hospital services in Wichita and Wesley Medical Center’s recent announcement that it plans to open a children’s hospital, area families with sick children will have more access to health care services in Wichita for their kids.
In February, Wesley announced it would open a $28 million children’s hospital within its main campus at 550 N. Hillside. According to Tripp Owings, vice president for pediatric operations and business development, construction will begin this summer and is expected to take between 12 to 18 months.
Less than a half-mile from Wesley, the Wichita outreach clinic of Children’s Mercy Hospital has been steadily adding services since opening in 2012. The hospital, based in Kansas City, Mo., has two regional Missouri clinics in St. Joseph and Joplin,with its only Kansas clinic operating in Wichita.
By June, it will have 11,000 square feet of clinic space in Wichita – more than doubling its size – but more importantly, it will add more specialized physicians, said Marshaun Butler, vice president for Children’s Mercy South and Regional Medical Practices.
“We want to make sure we’re responding to the demand for specialty services in the area,” she said. “We’re expanding in areas where pediatricians have indicated there is a need.”
The hospital is hiring three pediatric cardiologists who will be based full time in Wichita, rather than bringing in doctors from the Kansas City area three days a week, she said.
Children’s Mercy also plans to hire two additional endocrinologists to complement the two it already has in Wichita. Endocrinologists treat patients who suffer from hormonal imbalances linked to glands. The hospital also plans to add two nephrologists, or kidney specialists, Butler said. It will offer a new part-time hematology clinic by this summer.
Earlier this year, Children’s Mercy started a general surgery clinic for children. The clinic allows surgeons to see patients for pre- and post-operative care using telemedicine, so families won’t need to return to Kansas City, where the actual surgeries are conducted.
Other Children’s Mercy clinics in Wichita include cardiology, gastroenterology, allergy and asthma, orthopedic surgery, urology and cancer.
The clinics use a mix of on-site providers, as well as telemedicine, where a nurse facilitator and patient use telecommunications technology to link up from a Wichita exam room with a Children’s Mercy doctor in Kansas City.
Besides its clinic and office space at 3423 E. Murdock in the Wesley Medical Arts Tower, Children’s Mercy has outreach clinics at Mid-Kansas Pediatrics and Advanced Orthopaedic Associates.
In Wichita, Children’s Mercy sees more than 4,000 patients, and officials expect that number to “significantly increase when we expand our space,” Butler said.
When the $2.2 million expansion is completed by June, the Children’s Mercy clinic on East Murdock will have a larger waiting area, an additional 10 exam rooms and three rooms to administer echocardiogram tests, Butler said.
“We are making a commitment to meet a need so families don’t have to travel and can have access to a larger system,” Butler said.
Children’s Mercy, according to its website, is the only free-standing children’s hospital between St. Louis and Denver, and was the first hospital in Missouri or Kansas to have received a Magnet designation, which indicates superior nursing quality, from the American Nurses Credentialing Center.
Wesley’s new children’s hospital will be part of its current main hospital location, occupying the entire fifth floor, said Owings. It will include 30 private rooms for pediatric patients, and a renovation to the pediatric intensive care unit will result in 15 private intensive care rooms.
Contributing: Kelsey Ryan of The Eagle
Hospital expansions
Hospitals in the greater Wichita area are continuing to renovate and expand services. The improvements include:
▪ Earlier this year, Wesley Medical Center completed a $36 million renovation of its women’s tower, which occupies a 65,000-square-foot, four-story section of its main campus. The project included the renovation of 65 patient rooms and the addition of 16 new rooms.
▪ Via Christi Health completed the first phase of its plan to create private rooms at its St. Francis and St. Joseph hospitals, according to Via Christi officials. It opened a new wing with 20 private rooms at the St. Francis hospital in the southwest section of the eighth floor in late November. Renovations are continuing at St. Francis and are expected to be completed later this year, resulting in 350 private rooms at that hospital. The St. Joseph hospital renovations will follow, resulting in 90 private rooms.
▪ Construction at the Kansas Medical Center in Andover resulted in the recent addition of eight outpatient procedure rooms, said spokesman Malik Idbeis.
▪ Newton Medical Center expanded its Wound Care Center with a new facility that opened in February and added two hyperbaric oxygen units to treat specific kinds of wounds, said Chris Kelly, director of business development. The Newton Medical Center has also donated 12 acres of land as part of a partnership with the Greater Wichita YMCA to build a Newton YMCA. Groundbreaking on the new facility, in which the hospital will be involved to improve community wellness, will take place in May.
This story was originally published February 21, 2015 at 5:30 PM with the headline "Wichita children’s hospitals to provide more services for sick kids."