Alberta Children's Hospital

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Alberta Children's Hospital (new site opened in 2006)

Alberta Children's Hospital is a public hospital for sick children located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It is operated by the Calgary Health Region. The facility is located west of the University of Calgary campus grounds.

The new hospital opened on September 27, 2006 and is the first free-standing pediatric facility to be built in Canada in more than 20 years.

The Alberta Children’s Hospital was designed with substantial input from young patients, as well as families, physicians and staff of the hospital. In 2002, architects created renderings of how the hospital could look; a multi-storey brick building. These drawings were brought to the hospital’s Teen Advisory Group (TAG) and changed substantially, into a colourful, building closely resembling toy building blocks.^[1]

The idea for the Alberta Children’s Hospital was to create a building that would reduce stress and promote healing. The interior of the hospital has been designed to enable the delivery of family centred care. The hospital includes supports for families such as sleeping facilities for parents in each patient room, a babysitting service for siblings of patients, a sacred space for spiritual activities, a pet visitation room and the Healing Gardens that surround the new hospital, giving parents and their children areas to heal, to have fun and to spend private time.

The Alberta Children’s Hospital is used by patients from birth to age 18 from southern Alberta, southeastern British Columbia and southwestern Saskatchewan.