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Golisano Children's Hospital debuts 2 new floors

The Golisano Children's Hospital is getting ready to open two new floors to patients soon.

The $45 million endeavor includes a cardiac catheter lab, a gastroenterology suite, 23 new private pre-op and post-op rooms and 28 ICU & general care beds.

Floor six houses the pediatric intensive care and pediatric cardiac intensive care units, it’s big and bright with tall windows and light yellow and purple paint covering the walls.

Dr. Jeffrey Rubenstein is the chief of this floor; he says it was important for them to build all of the rooms exactly the same.

"When you're taking care of somebody who's very ill, you want very much not to have to think about where things are. You want to be focused on what you're doing, and the muscle memory and the brain memory that comes intuitively from working in the same place over and over and over again is really important to us."

Rubenstein says the changes to the unit were collaborative. The head walls were designed by nurses, and the family spaces were decided by… families.

"Bathrooms, space, but also space that was a little set off. Because if our patients if they aren’t better in a day or two tend to stay for a week or two and then families wind up having to pay their bills and do other things and they really like to be set off a little bit from the world at times."

The fourth floor is still a bit under construction but features six new, spacious pediatric operating rooms, as well as a waiting room with up the minute surgery updates.

Dr. Walter Pegoli is chief of Pediatric Surgery.

"This for me is a dream come true. I've been here 20 years so I started out in the general operating rooms and we had no space to call our own. I mean, it was just me and a couple other surgeons, maybe one or two pediatric anesthesiologists. Maybe we were doing 300, 500 cases a year; now we're doing 20,000."

Pegoli said an important addition to the operating rooms are monitors that will stream video of an operation around the room. He says it enhances their capabilities as a teaching hospital as well.

The floors are aiming to be open to patients by early September.