WILMINGTON, Del. — Skanska USA, in collaboration with Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, recently offered a sneak peek of the hospital’s expansion project, unveiling full-scale mockups of an intensive care room, typical inpatient room, emergency department bay, as well as a care team station for the patients, families and Nemours associates who compose the hospital’s Youth Advisory Council and Family Advisory Council. The mock-up rooms were designed to test multiple elements, including the location of clinical equipment, room lighting, type of furniture and efficiency of the space.
The unveiling allowed guests to take tours of each room, where hosts pointed out unique design features that were incorporated based on input from Nemours patients and families. Inpatient rooms were designed to resemble a child’s bedroom rather than a typical hospital room. In addition, the individual patient rooms were designed with the family in mind – each with its own bathroom and comprised of three zones: a family zone equipped with a couch and small table for family/visitors, a spacious patient zone for the child and a staff zone for nurses and caregivers.
In August 2011, Skanska USA and Nemours kicked off a 450,000-square-foot expansion of the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children — a $250M project 
scheduled for completion in mid-2014. The architect for the project is FKP Architects.
The hospital’s expansion will create an environment that promotes healing and advances the quality of care, consisting of 144 single-patient rooms, a 44-bay emergency department, central workstations that allow for visibility into patient rooms and quick access to equipment and medicine, an atrium, places for families to congregate, healing gardens, a rooftop helipad, five-story atrium, 188 underground parking spaces, family centered services and amenities and larger, more technologically advanced single-patient rooms.
