Children's Hospital Colorado Pediatric Mental Health Institute

PROJECT NARRATIVE

This 52,700-square-foot multiphase renovation encompasses three floors of an existing pediatric hospital. With the goal of restructuring the program in a more holistic way, the design team developed an expanded neighborhood-based inpatient program alongside accompanying outpatient spaces, responding to the growing need for pediatric mental health care by expanding the capacity of an existing mental health institute. One floor is split between eating disorder treatment and partial hospitalization, one floor is dedicated to neuropsychiatric special care, and one floor is devoted to psychiatric inpatient services, together encompassing a comprehensive range of treatment needs. Beyond adding inpatient beds, the new layout also increases capacity for telehealth and offers a complete continuum of psychiatric services, supporting both aftercare for inpatient stays and treatment for patients before hospitalization becomes necessary. Where the previous program shared a single treatment area across all age groups, the new layout separates young children, middle-school-aged children, and adolescents into age-appropriate neighborhoods, allowing children to feel more at home alongside their peers while alleviating safety concerns and giving each neighborhood room to function as a discrete zone for free ambulation.

A primary goal of the redesign was to keep parents involved throughout their child's treatment; patient bedrooms, consult rooms, and lounge spaces were designed to accommodate children and their families, allowing parents to eat, sleep, and spend time with their children during hospitalization. When this isn't possible for safety reasons but a parent still wishes to remain onsite, a dedicated family resource center offers beds, a lounge, a kitchen, laundry, and support services. Throughout the space, biophilic motifs, soothing colors, and home-like design elements help reduce the stigma and clinical atmosphere often associated with mental health treatment, while windows added along corridors bring borrowed daylight into interior spaces. The sally port, often a point of distress for incoming patients, was enlarged and converted from a vestibule into a waiting room to create a more relaxing point of entry, and nooks and small spaces added throughout corridors and group rooms give patients places to de-escalate, helping them regulate and reengage with the group when ready while allowing staff to safely monitor them alongside the larger group.

Using spaghetti diagrams to map the many workflows that regularly require access to the inpatient units, such as nourishment, cleaning staff, and maintenance, the team designed dedicated paths of travel for individuals whose presence could trigger a patient, minimizing overlap with patient spaces. Because maintaining as much operational space as possible throughout construction was essential, the project is being completed in four phases made up of numerous micro-phases, an approach that also helps ensure the safety of patients, staff, and contractors throughout construction.