The First Floor
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The first floor integrates these two elements through the following features:
Patients, families and visitors are able to walk from the Children’s Hospital of Georgia parking deck to the front door under a covered walkway. Out front is the playscape, a sort of archeological dig with nooks and crannies for exploration, dinosaur fossils and other novelties. A shallow stream running through the playscape is elevated so kids in wheelchairs can roll right up to it.
When you walk through the front door into the two-story glass lobby, the first thing likely to catch your eye is the video aquarium, a 6-foot high and 26-foot long structure with moving images of underwater scenes. The video aquarium also displays other videos designed to calm, inform and entertain.
To the left is a play and seating area with interactive games mounted on the walls. This portion of the Children's Medical Center is fun right down to the clear floor, through which you can see the stream that runs from the playscape in front of the hospital to this area of the lobby.
On the right side of the lobby are the main information desk, welcome center and public elevators.
The hospital has two large corridors, one on each side of the building. On the left corridor, you'll find the dining room, which includes an outdoor dining area.
Just across the hall from the dining room are the gift shop, chaplains office and chapel. Like many features of the Children’s Hospital of Georgia, the chapel will reflect the tastes of children and adolescents, with stained glass depicting a country setting with bunnies, flowers, rainbows and trees and clouds on the ceiling.
The pediatric emergency department, which has its entrance on Harper Street, runs across the entire back of the new hospital and parallel to the adult emergency department. It contains a triage room, two trauma rooms, three acute-care rooms, one cast room and an X-ray room as well as the nurses station, lounge and on-call suite. The five-room minor-care area has a separate seating area. A larger family seating area has a separate breast-feeding room. The departments trauma elevators go directly to X-ray on the second floor, the pediatric intensive care unit and surgery on the third floor and to the helideck on the Children’s Hospital of Georgia roof.
The large corridor on the Harper Street side is the main public thoroughfare to treatment areas and a technological arbor. Green is the theme in this area where department entrances have tree canopies constructed of computer circuit boards. Three video totem poles display images from nature, such as redwood trees and waterfalls.
The Harper Street corridor also holds admissions, financial counseling, case management and a 120-seat conference center for teaching and public events. Next door are the family resource library, with information about diseases affecting children as well as fun children's books, and a medical library.