Gillette Children’s Specialty Center Open Now!

Putting patients first and prioritizing welcoming aesthetics, designing Gillette Children’s Specialty Center was a collaborative effort. The plans and layout were created based on feedback primarily from patients and families, many staff members from all outpatient service areas, the Gillette Family Advisory Council, and other community members.
 

The center’s fifth floor is equipped with patient-focused enhancements like adult-sized changing tables in the bathrooms that shift in height for easy access from a wheelchair, a sensory wall, and color-changing, dimmable lights. It includes 12 exam rooms, a drop-in computer room, multiple outpatient pediatric psychological therapy and recreation rooms, play spaces, lactation areas, and last but certainly not least, three dedicated research labs with customized equipment storage.
 

The three different types of clinical labs — a collaborative research lab, a research wet lab, and a neuromodulation lab — offer seamless connections for physicians and their young patients enrolled in clinical trials for new devices, completing blood work, and undergoing cutting-edge care in brain and spinal therapies.
 

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum was instrumental in securing $1.5 million in federal spending toward the research labs. These include a hydraulic ceiling lift and cameras to help determine the pain levels of patients who are nonverbal, among other tools to assess motor control and movement disorders. The goal is to develop the latest equipment for children’s specialty care, including biofeedback, robotic, and exoskeleton devices.
 

Moving concepts from research to clinical practice can take 17 years or more — in other words, an entire childhood — a frustration to medical experts like Jennifer Laine, MD, orthopedic surgeon and Medical Director of Research at Gillette Children’s. Lining up patients, practitioners, and sizable new laboratories directly across the hall from each other will hopefully speed up that process while improving patient care.
 

“It’s really about increasing efficiency, having a better quality of the space … and it will really enhance patient and family inclusion,” said Dr. Laine. “We think that it’s really important that the research we do here is clinically relevant to our patients and families.”

• State-of-the-art outpatient exam and treatment rooms
• Rooms and support space to enhance and advance patient-facing research initiatives 
• Expanded psychology and psychotherapy treatment areas 
• Therapeutic Recreation and play therapy rooms 
• Space for Gillette employees to collaborate