Ohio facility is ‘beacon for stigma-free recovery’

Nationwide Children’s Hospital, one of the US’s largest paediatric healthcare and research centres, has partnered with architects, architecture+ and NBBJ, to build the country’s largest freestanding, full-service psychiatric facility on its children’s hospital campus in Columbus, Ohio. By locating the new Big Lots Behavioral Health Pavilion directly on its main campus, Nationwide Children aims to reduce the stigma associated with behavioural health disorders, and facilitate access to treatment and services. Sara K. Wengert, AIA, ASID, a principal at architecture+, reports.

Nationwide Children’s Hospital says it is committed to approaching behavioural health as an illness, ‘just like cancer or asthma’. The new nine-storey, 386,000 ft2 comprehensive behavioural health pavilion on its West Campus in Columbus, Ohio, will allow Nationwide to significantly expand its provision of mental health services consistent with the standard of care for which it is nationally known. The facility is the hub for an extensive network of community-based mental health services, and treats paediatric patients ranging from young children through ‘teens’, offering a full range of programmes – via a Psychiatric Crisis Department, inpatient care, crisis stabilisation, partial hospitalisation, intensive and conventional outpatient clinics, bridging services, and integrated research. Nationwide is doing something unique and unparalleled; no other psychiatric hospital in America provides this continuum of services on a single site. 

The hospital leadership team initiated the project in recognition of the immense need for acute child and adolescent  psychiatric beds in the region, fully understanding that the project would be sustained by the greater system. With that, efficiency in space use and operation would be paramount. The project accommodates a complex programme within a very constrained urban site, and architecture+ strategically developed cluster-based inpatient units with the introduction of a mid-storey courtyard as a means of accommodating the amount of perimeter, window, and daylight needed in an effective modern psychiatric hospital.