Wesley Medical Center to build children’s hospital

Families with sick children won’t have to travel far anymore for care.

Wesley Medical Center announced Thursday that it plans to open a $28 million children’s hospital within its main campus at 550 N. Hillside.

“We looked at what the opportunity was to keep more children in Wichita here,” said Bill Voloch, interim president and CEO at Wesley.

“When families have to have care on a regular basis, it’s very difficult to drive 3 1/2 to 4 hours to the nearest children’s hospital. Our goal here is to create as many subspecialties as we possibly can so parents and families do not have to travel.”

The children’s hospital will be attached to the current building, with the hospital entrance at Hillside and Elm becoming the new entrance and lobby to the children’s hospital.

The hospital will include 30 private rooms for pediatric patients and 15 private pediatric intensive care rooms. Voloch said the hospital will be on the fifth floor of the building and will include renovation of the pediatric intensive care unit.

The hospital now has 12 pediatric intensive care rooms, but eight aren’t private, Voloch said.

“They’re separated by drapes, which is, as you can imagine, not the best environment to have when your child is in the ICU. So it was very important for us to create that environment where we could have all private rooms,” he said.

Lindall Smith, director of Wesley’s pediatric intensive care unit, has been at Wesley for nearly 20 years. He said when he started, Wesley had an eight-bed unit. It expanded that to 12 beds in 1996 and 1997.

“This is a huge project for us both physically in terms of coordinating the project and making it happen but also a huge improvement in quality of private units and private beds,” he said. “We’re going to make it so the families are more comfortable staying with their children.”

Construction could start as early as June and finish within 12 to 18 months.

The new hospital could also mean 40 to 50 new jobs in the next five years, Voloch said.

Wesley is recruiting for several physicians, including pediatric surgeons, pediatric intensivists, pediatric hospitalists and potentially specialists in hematology, pulmonology and urology.

The hospital has not yet been named.

The closest children’s hospitals are Children’s Mercy in Kansas City and the Children’s Hospital at the University of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City.

This story was originally published February 5, 2015 at 2:59 PM with the headline "Wesley Medical Center to build children’s hospital."