Children’s Hospital and Exempla St. Joseph Hospital will build a 12-bed, $18 million pediatric, acute- care facility at St. Joseph’s downtown location.
The joint venture will ensure a downtown presence for the area’s largest pediatric hospital.
The 17,500-square-foot “hospital within a hospital” will be located at St. Joseph’s campus at East 18th Avenue and Franklin Street.
“Children’s Hospital is staying in the neighborhood,” said Dori Biester, the hospital’s chief executive.
The facility will have an emergency room, surgical suites, laboratories and private rooms with beds for patients’ families.
Exempla and Children’s will roughly split the project’s cost, said Jeffrey Selberg, chief executive of St. Joseph.
No money from Children’s ongoing fundraising campaign will be used, Biester said.
About 45 new employees of Children’s Hospital will work at the new facility.
Children’s is one of four hospitals – all of which care for the indigent and uninsured – that are leaving the city.
This trend has been “a cause of concern for the city of Denver,” Selberg said.
The University of Colorado Hospital was the first to leave, for new quarters at the former Fitzsimons Army hospital site. The Veterans Administration hospital and Children’s will follow. St. Anthony Central also will leave for a site in Lakewood.
Selberg said that St. Joseph executives had no plans to join the exodus.
“It is our plan to make significant investments in this place for the next 10 years,” he said, in reference to the hospital’s long history downtown.
City Councilwoman Elbra Wedgeworth, who represents the district where Children’s and St. Joseph are located, said she was heartened by Children’s decision.
“They could have just bailed,” she said.
Wedgeworth said she is confident Children’s would continue treating uninsured and indigent kids.
“We know they will continue to do that,” she said. “That’s what we expect from them; that’s what their mission is.”
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-820-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
