More than 150 staff volunteers spent their Sunday helping to move patients into the newly opened floors of the Children’s Hospital.

In the weeks leading up to the Nov. 8 move-in, the hospital held daily meetings with managers and staff to coordinate all aspects of the moves and ensure the safety of patients and staff.

View a gallery of photos from patient move-in day

Among the patients moved on Sunday were 25 newborns in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), five pediatric surgical patients, two laboring mothers and 15 postpartum mothers with their newborns. Additionally, 10 adult patients were moved into the new adult-patient rooms on the fifth floor of the Children’s Hospital.

“We’ve been looking forward to this patient move-in day for months,” said April Adley, vice president of nursing for the Children’s Hospital and Women’s Health Services. “We can’t wait to start providing care in these wonderful new spaces that are so patient- and family-centric and also provide even more opportunities for advanced treatments and collaboration.” 

The $148 million, 126,000-square-foot expansion features state-of-the-art technology, a new Women and Babies Center, a 56-bed Level IV NICU and the state’s only Small Baby Unit, created specifically to help improve growth and brain development in premature babies.

In addition to the Women and Babies Center, the Labor and Delivery Unit and the NICU, which were previously located in an adult section of Hershey Medical Center, moved to the seventh and eighth floors of the expanded Children’s Hospital.