WDET News
- Children's Hospital To Expand
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May 15, 2008Metro Desk - Link to Audio
May 15, 2008 By Pat Batcheller
Children’s Hospital of Michigan says it plans to build a 34-million dollar outpatient pediatric center in midtown Detroit…in part to ease overcrowding at its existing facility. Doctor Herman Gray is the hospital’s president. He says the current clinic is too small.
“Currently we have a general pediatric clinic that sees in the neighborhood of 28-thouasnd children every year, and in a space that was really built for 10-thousand kids. So that obviously affects our ability to see children as efficiently as we’d like to, in terms of wait times and how long it takes to get an appointment.
Doctor Gray says about six-hundred children are on a waiting list to get into the general pediatric clinic…while the average visit to the emergency department takes less than two hours. Gray says the hospital will try to raise most of the money for the new clinic through donations. Construction is scheduled to begin next year on the site of an abandoned nursing home across the street from the hospital.