Alberta Children's Hospital


Alberta Children's Hospital is the largest public hospital for sick children in the prairie provinces, and is located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It is operated by Alberta Health Services – Calgary Health Region. The new facility opened on September 27, 2006, and is the first free-standing pediatric facility to be built in Canada in more than 20 years. It was originally opened on May 19, 1922, as the Junior Red Cross Children's Hospital. It is located west of the University of Calgary campus grounds and just across from the site of the Foothills Medical Centre.
ACH is one of several children's hospitals in Canada.

Design

The Alberta Children's Hospital was designed with substantial input from young patients, as well as families, physicians and staff of the hospital. In 2002, architects created renderings of how the hospital could look; a multi-storey brick building. These drawings were brought to the hospital's Teen Advisory Group and changed substantially into a colourful building closely resembling toy building blocks.
The idea for the Alberta Children's Hospital was to create a building that would reduce stress and promote healing. The interior of the hospital has been designed to enable the delivery of family centred care. The hospital includes supports for families such as sleeping facilities for parents in each patient room, a babysitting service for siblings of patients, a sacred space for spiritual activities, a pet visitation room and the Healing Gardens that surround the new hospital, giving parents and their children areas to heal, to have fun and to spend private time.
The Alberta Children's Hospital is used by patients from birth to age 18 from southern Alberta, southeastern British Columbia and southwestern Saskatchewan. It is an accredited pediatric level I trauma centre by the Trauma Association of Canada. Additionally, the ACH is the provincial expert and referral centre for bone marrow transplantation, and is the leader in Western Canada, for pediatric neurosciences. It also is the only pediatric hospital in Canada that consists of a comprehensive Behavioral Unit, is the world leader in congenital cataracts surgery, and has the largest pediatric vision clinic in all of Western Canada.
The Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute for Child and Maternal Health is the Alberta Children's Hospital's affiliated research institute, and has a team of over 150 members dedicated to research and teaching excellence in the study of human development from embryo to adulthood.

Clinics

The facility operates 34 clinics: