The first cries of a newborn echoed through the new North Tower at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla Sunday morning, marking both a personal milestone and a historic one for the hospital.
Lauren Dehasque of Rancho Santa Fe, accompanied by her husband Thibaud, was the first patient to move into the new $664 million facility, giving birth to daughter Freja shortly after settling into a spacious seventh-floor room with sweeping mountain views.
“It’s just so bright and beautiful,” Lauren said of the eight-story inpatient building, which includes comprehensive mother-baby services, advanced technology operating rooms and private patient rooms.
The 420,000-square-foot North Tower officially opened its doors Sunday after nearly a decade of planning and construction, officials said. Over a four-hour period beginning at 8:15 a.m., a coordinated team of doctors, nurses and technicians transferred 130 patients, including newborns and expectant mothers, from the hospital’s original Browning Building into the new state-of-the-art tower via enclosed passageways.
With this expansion, Scripps La Jolla now has 495 licensed inpatient beds, including 188 in the North Tower, as well as an additional 36 neonatal intensive care beds licensed to Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego.
Mother-baby services span three floors of the new facility, featuring 18 private labor and delivery rooms (including five antepartum rooms), two cesarean section operating rooms, 24 NICU beds and 38 postpartum beds. Six of the labor rooms include large soaking tubs to support pain management during labor, and a nursery and boutique on the postpartum floor provide resources and amenities to support new mothers.
Patients also benefit from wireless vital sign monitoring, allowing them to move about freely without being tethered to machines.
“About 3,200 babies are delivered at Scripps La Jolla each year,” Ronald Salzetti, M.D., department chair of obstetrics and gynecology for Scripps Clinic. “The opening of the North Tower ensures that those infants and their mothers will continue to receive the very best care possible in a place that was built with the future in mind, allowing for services and technology to evolve as medicine continues to advance.”
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