State-of-Art Facility Expected to Enhance Family-Centered Care Concept
Oak Lawn, Ill. – For mothers and families, Advocate Christ Medical Center will soon be offering “New Beginnings.”
That’s the theme for the Women and Infants’ Birthing Center, now under construction and scheduled to open in January 2016 in the medical center’s new, seven-story patient tower.
“The center will enable us to offer an overall enhancement of the childbirth experience for both our low-risk mothers and those moms who are experiencing a high-risk pregnancy,” said Joseph Pavese, M.D., chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Christ Medical Center.
Christ Medical Center is designated at the highest level of perinatal care in Illinois. For that reason, “we must be able to provide the right environment for parents and babies with a full range of needs. Our new birthing center will enable us to do just that – with complete privacy and many amenities for families,” Dr. Pavese said.
The new facility also will offer parents ample opportunity to bond with their newborn following delivery, said Andrea Miller, director of women and infants’ services at the medical center.
“Not only will we be carrying over our philosophy of family-centered care to the new facility, we will be enhancing it,” she noted.
As examples of this expanded, family-centered care concept, Miller cited the new birthing center’s private:
- Birthing suites, each of which includes bathroom, shower, advanced medical technology, Internet access and flat-screen television
- Rooms specially equipped for high-risk mothers
- Triage rooms adjacent to labor and delivery for quicker evaluation
- Ultrasound suite with access to maternal-fetal medicine specialists
- Recovery rooms for mothers who have undergone cesarean sections, and
- Post-delivery suites with a customized infant bathing tub, wireless Internet access, TV and a family area./li>
Perhaps, the most significant highlight of the new birthing facility will be a lactation center that extends care to moms and families beyond the hospital setting, Miller explained
Part of the lactation center will be devoted to educational and informational kiosks and retail and rental items, including supplies for nursing mothers, clothes for the premature infant and breast pumps. The back section of the facility will offer breast-pumping and breast-feeding areas, rooms for fitting breast-feeding brassieres and consultation rooms where one of five certified lactation consultants can assist a new mother who might be experiencing breast-feeding challenges.
In 2014, Christ Medical Center’s women and infant services team delivered nearly 3,750 babies, and that number is expected to continue rising. The multidisciplinary team includes some 40 obstetricians and 120-130 nurses.
Opening of the new birthing center also is expected to lead to enhancement of other related services, including expansion of the medical center’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
About Advocate Christ Medical Center
Advocate Christ Medical Center is part of Advocate Health Care, which is one of the nation’s leading health care networks. A not-for-profit, 694-bed, premier teaching institution with more than 1,200 affiliated physicians, Christ Medical Center is a leader in health care and one of the major referral hospitals in the Midwest in a number of specialties, including cardiovascular services, heart, kidney and lung transplantation, neurosciences, oncology, orthopedics and women’s health. The hospital also has one of the busiest Level I trauma centers in Illinois providing emergency care for more than 100,000 patient visits annually and is a leader in breakthrough technologies, including eICU® (electronic intensive care unit) monitoring, robotic da Vinci Surgery System® and CyberKnife® Radiosurgery. For the last four years (2012-2015), the medical center has been named to the Truven Health 100 Top Hospitals® list. U.S. News & World Report has ranked the medical center among the nation’s leading providers for cardiology and heart surgery, geriatric medicine, gynecology and neurology/neurosurgery and rated it overall as being among the top three hospitals in Illinois. The hospital is also recognized by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) as a Magnet Center. Magnet status represents the highest honor in the nursing profession. To obtain more information or to visit our newsroom, log on to: www.advocatehealth.com/christ.