Stanford children’s hospital to modernize after $25 million donation

Stanford Medicine Children’s Health will renovate its West Building, including the Johnson Center for Pregnancy and Newborn Services, to provide more privacy for patients and comfort for families, the hospital announced. According to the Oct. 23 announcement, the hospital received a $25 million gift from Bay Area philanthropists Carol and Ned Spieker that will help fund the changes.

“[Carol and Ned Spieker’s] generosity helps turn our vision for a completely reimagined space into reality — to serve and support more families from our community and beyond,” Luanne Smedley, executive director of the Johnson Center, wrote in an email to The Daily.

The Spiekers both served as Class of 2016 Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI) fellows at Stanford. The couple told the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health that their children and grandchildren were born at the hospital. 

“We care deeply about helping growing families in our community get the best possible care,” the Spiekers said in the hospital’s announcement. “We feel fortunate that they are healthy and thriving, and we want to help ensure that future generations of moms and babies receive the support they need.”   

The hospital welcomes about 4,500 babies each year — nearly a dozen per day —  Smedley said, of which 70% are categorized as high-risk cases.

To accommodate patients with a higher standard of care, the West Building project is set to include private rooms for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and labor and delivery unit. The project will take multiple years and has no definite end date yet. The finished building will include 15 private infusion rooms and 14 larger exam rooms.

“Studies have shown that private rooms promote shortened hospital stays, support parents’ mental health, lower infection rates and create stronger family bonding,” Smedley, who also serves as the Johnson Center’s associate chief bursing officer, said.

Janene Ferch, a neonatologist at the hospital, noted the need to modernize, saying the outdated building no longer matches recent standards for neonatal care. Ferch said the neonatal part of the hospital, located in the West Building, has “extremely crowded” spaces that don’t reflect the rest of the facility. 

The children’s hospital opened a new main building in 2017, but the NICU and maternity wing stayed in the West Building, with plans for renovation finally coming to fruition with the Spiekers’ donation. Fuerch said some of the units haven’t been “truly remodeled” since the West Building opened in 1991. 

“We have been in the old hospital for this whole period of time, in an era where they used to put all the babies in the same room,” Fuerch said to The Daily. “Things in the last 20 years have shifted to more private rooms. We want parents at the bedside. We want them to have privacy to have conversations that the rest of the room doesn’t overhear. To enable that, you need a complete transformation, more space.”

Smedley said the NICU will transition from “large open-bay style rooms” to private rooms. The hospital’s gardens, lobby and lounge will also undergo redesigns to provide more spaces for families to relax and connect. 

Some of these updates have already been completed. In March, the NICU unveiled an infant nutrition lab, as well as 14 new private and semiprivate rooms. This summer, the hospital opened an infusion clinic, an antepartum unit for high-risk pregnancies and the Bass Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Diseases. The new maternity unit now has over 50 private postpartum rooms, allowing patients’ partners to comfortably stay overnight. 

Fuerch noted how the design of a hospital has a “dramatic” impact on patient recovery.

“Having two moms and two babies together [in one room] is way too hard to actually recover [and] rest,” Fuerch said. “Now, we have mostly private rooms — definitely a huge improvement for those moms and the well babies.”

NICU patients often have longer hospital stays due to premature birth, developmental impediments and other complications. In these cases, mothers can go home after two to five days, but their babies sometimes remain in the hospital for many months. 

“That’s a very long journey for the family filled with lots of trauma,” Fuerch said. “[Being] in there with their baby helps the parents heal much better and adapt to the difficult medical circumstances that they’re facing.”

However, she said the construction poses challenges to the West Building’s patients, who are “very sensitive to loud noises.” 

“We have to shut down certain areas [and] move them to others to protect them from the noise that occurs when construction is happening,” Fuerch said. “Their hearing is developing, so we have to be very careful.”

Smedley said the construction is a “top priority” and will be “carried out in phases” so the West Building can remain open. 

“It really is dependent on financial support, especially with cuts in Medicaid that have been really challenging for children’s hospitals around the country,” Fuerch said. “Philanthropy allows these changes to be made so that we can take the best possible care of our patients and their families.”

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