Elmhurst Hospital in its handsome Prairie-style building seems to be rooted on its site near the corner of York Street and Roosevelt Road, so many may be surprised to be reminded that the new hospital opened there just 10 years ago.
A birthday celebration this past Friday, complete with cake in the cafeteria, marked 10 years since the new hospital opened on June 25, 2011. That was the date hospital staff moved patients out of the old hospital at the northwest corner of Schiller Street and Berteau Avenue.
“We moved 101 patients in less than four hours on (that) Saturday,” recalled Pamela Dunley, the hospital’s president and CEO in a recent phone conversation with Pioneer Press. “And we had to keep operations going at both facilities at that time. It took us about a year to plan the move and to coordinate everything that happened. And we made it safely.”
Dunley, a nurse, was chief nursing officer and chief operating officer at the time of the move. A year of planning the move and staff training paid off on the day of the move and since, she said.
“We had an emergency C-section (Caesarean birth) at the new hospital and we had an emergency catheterization procedure at the old hospital (that day) and everything went smoothly and everybody arrived safely,” she said. “It was a very exciting day.”
The numbers for the new hospital are impressive — a $450 million, state-of-the-art hospital capable of treating 259 patients, all in private rooms in the five-story structure, now with more than 2,600 employees.
But that’s not the real story, Dunley said. “The story is the way the community supported us to be able to build this kind of beautiful but very functional but very safe integrated campus that would move us into the next 80 or 100 years.”
– Original Credit: Elmhurst Hospital
The campus, at 155 E. Brush Hill Rd., includes the Elmhurst Center for Health, the Nancy W. Knowles Cancer Center and a medical office building west of the main hospital.
Dunley said the new hospital combines the person-centered patient care approach of the Planetree International organization with the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired architecture that provides light open spaces with gardens, terraces and even balconies.
Dunley noted that planning and design of the new hospital standardized layout, patient rooms and nursing stations on each of the hospital’s five floors. The layout allows staff to be with the patient more frequently, Dunley said. “Anybody new coming into the organization only has to learn one room, one pod. It’s all identical — and that’s really safe, especially in emergencies.
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“Even when every bed’s full, it’s still quiet and calm,” she said.
The hospital has won a number of awards, including an A grade in The Leapfrog Group’s Spring 2021 Hospital Safety Grades, one of only 27 hospitals in the U.S. to achieve straight A’s since the Hospital Safety Grades began in 2012.
Elmhurst and Edward Hospital in Naperville together make up Edward-Elmhurst Health, recently named one of the nation’s 15 Top Health Systems by Fortune/IBM Watson Health. For the second year in a row, Fortune/IBM Watson Health named Edward and Elmhurst among the 100 Top Hospitals in the U.S.
Elmhurst Mayor Scott Levin noted those awards and others, calling the new facility “one of the crown jewels of the community.” He noted that the old hospital site has become the site for more than 50 new homes.
“Ten years later, we’ve got a beautiful hospital, we’ve got a thriving downtown and we’ve got some nice new houses up there where the hospital use to be,” Levin said in a phone conversation with Pioneer Press. “So it’s a happy ending to a 10-year story. At the end of the day, we have a much better, more beautiful hospital that is award winning.”
Dunley stressed the hospital’s deep roots in the community. “We continue to have a very strong foundation of philanthropic people in the community who support our hospital, who help us to stay current and be ready for the future.”