MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — After breaking ground in June, earth work continues ahead of a 155-bed tower that will be home to WVU Medicine Children’s.
The addition continues WVU Hospitals’ evolution of J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital from a singular, general hospital to what WVU Health System President and CEO Albert Wright describes as a “collection of five to six subspecialized institutes.”
WVU Medicine Children’s follows the completion and 2017 opening of the $200 million Southeast Tower — home to the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute. The new pediatric tower will be connected to the heart institute.
Wright said WVU Hospitals anticipates Children’s will open in December 2020. While significant construction has yet to begin, the price tag is estimated at around $152 million.
He said the finished product will be among the top pediatric facilities in the country, bolstering what is already West Virginia’s top hospital for children by enhancing offerings in neonatal intensive care as well as pediatric neuroscience, cardiology and cancer care.
“We want to become a much more comprehensive pediatric center of care, so that essentially anything that you would need to have done as a child, we want to be able to do that and we want to have the facility to do that in,” Wright said, explaining that the new tower will allow adult services to expand into the current home of WVU Children’s, located on the sixth floor of Ruby Memorial Hospital.
The WVU Medicine Children’s tower is in its first stage of construction, which involves shaping the earth to accommodate the building and laying the foundation.
“Now that there is dirt moving outside the hospital, it’s got people excited,” Wright said. “We’ve done a lot of great things here over the last five years, but there is no project that I’m more excited about than our Children’s Hospital.”
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Story by Ben Conley