COLUMBUS – The nation’s largest hospital for children is about to get much bigger.
Nationwide Children’s Hospital officials on Friday announced a $730 million expansion to its East Side campus, anchored by a center dedicated to children and adolescents with behavioral health conditions, which hospital officials say will be the most comprehensive facility of its kind in the U.S.
The $158 million eight-story Behavioral Health Pavilion will house a Crisis and Observation Center and outpatient programs and will open with 48 inpatient beds with the potential to expand to up to at least 66 beds, said hospital board chair Alex Fischer.
Construction is scheduled to begin next year with planned opening date of 2020.
Hospital officials estimate 11 percent of children ages eight to 11 and 22 percent of those 13 to 18 experience some form mental illness but only half receive treatment.
Nationwide Children’s Hospital is the nation’s largest nob-profit freestanding pediatric healthcare network.
The second phase of the hospital’s expansion, which began in 2012, is expected to be completed in 2022 and hospital officials have promised it will create 1,000 jobs by 2019, according to a tax incentive package from the city of Columbus, and 1,000 more by 2024.
The expansion’s second phase also includes the five-story, 222,000-square-foot Livingston Ambulatory Building, slated to open summer 2017, will house ambulatory services including primary care, dental services, adolescent medicine and outpatient behavioral health services.
Inpatient beds and five additional operating rooms will be added to the Hospital Tower next year at a cost of $47 million.
A total of $4.5 million will be spent to improve the Main Campus Childcare Center for faculty and staff, allowing for upgraded playgrounds and improved green space around the building, and for enhancement to Livingston Park.
An existing research building will be completed and another constructed by 2021 at total cost of $110 million.
Additional facilities planned as part of the Phase II expansion include a six-story faculty office building, slated to open this month, the Near East Office Building to be completed in the winter of 2018, a central energy plant and a new data center.