Newborns’ families get space to rest
If you go up the yellow elevators at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital and step off on the fifth floor, you’ll find a quiet space for families to relax and rejuvenate.
Riverside's new Ronald McDonald Family Room is intended to provide respite for families of hospitalized children.
"We took a look at where the biggest need would be in central Ohio," said Dee Anders, CEO of Ronald McDonald House Charities of Central Ohio. Riverside
The Ronald McDonald Family Room will allow local families to stay close to their sick children at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital. typically leads hospitals in central Ohio in the number of babies born each year.
Riverside President Brian Jepson hopes the room will be “like a home away from home,” especially for families of patients in the hospital’s newly renovated Newborn Intensive Care Unit, or NICU, created in partnership with Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
“When you have a baby and the baby’s in the NICU, their average is 18 days to stay,” Anders said. “Some of those babies are there for months.”
The 1,000 squarefoot space will be the first Family Room in central Ohio and one of 200 worldwide. Its amenities include washers and dryers with free detergent, a disabilityaccessible shower supplied with toiletries and linens, a dining area with a kitchenette, a work desk with a computer and complimentary WiFi, a play area for kids and lounge spaces for families and adults.
The project has been in the works for about three years. “We had our very first conversation with OhioHealth about this in January 2014,” Anders said.
“We really didn’t have the space at that time,” Jepson said. “But
we started the planning and put things in motion.” When the hospital on the Northwest Side started planning its $ 9 million expansion of its NICU, an opportunity arose. “It’s been kind of a domino of facility changes that we were able to do this,” Jepson said.
The Columbus Ronald McDonald House is located at 711 E Livingston Ave., near Children’s Hospital on the South Side, and provides families a place to stay overnight while their children are hospitalized in the city.
“Technically, when somebody stays at the Ronald McDonald House, they’re from 35 miles away or further,” Anders said. “It’s not convenient for them to go home every night.”
The new family room also fills a need for local parents and siblings who would not qualify to stay at the house. Most of the families hosted at Riverside are from the Columbus area, Jepson said. The room will be available to those families as well as those who stay at the house at night who might just need a break or want to be closer to their sick child during the day.
With funding from OhioHealth and support from Safelite AutoGlass, Worthington Industries, and the Blue Jackets Foundation along with the Lady Jackets, the nearly $ 500,000 project was completed Friday and will be unveiled Monday. The
room will open to families Tuesday, and Jepson expects it will be put to immediate use.
The room will be run almost entirely by volunteers, with one Riverside staff member to organize them. Special volunteers will come in to offer services in a multipurpose room.
“Tuesday evenings ( might) be massages ... or Wednesday evening could be pizza night,” Anders said. “We’re hoping we can get folks to do that kind of thing as well.”
Anders said the charity needs 100 volunteers to run the room and is still looking for people to work some nights and weekends. Finding them should be no problem: the Columbus House is the largest in the world, serving more than 4,500 families each year with the help of more than 6,000 volunteers, according to the Ronald McDonald House website.
Anders predicts that the new family room will have a similar legacy.
“We hope that this is very successful for OhioHealth. ... It’s going to have a huge impact because of the volume of patients that go through Riverside,” she said.
Jepson said the room shows the hospital is “not just caring for the infants and the babies, but making sure we’re caring for the entire family.”