Stony Brook Children's Hospital invests $55 million to expand pediatric emergency department

Stony Brook Children’s Hospital will spend $55 million to expand its pediatric emergency department in Stony Brook, aimed at serving thousands more patients each year, hospital officials said.

The hospital network started construction on the addition to its existing facility last fall, but will officially break ground Friday, according to a news release from the network. Construction on the new department is expected to be completed in 2029.

The expansion comes as Suffolk County’s population has grown over the past 15 years, increasing demand for pediatric emergency care in the region, said Carolyn Milana, physician in chief for Stony Brook Children’s Hospital.

“Our volume has grown,” Milana said. “Our space, on the other hand, has not changed at all. … Adding the additional rooms will increase our capacity to really provide good care for those kids.”

The pediatric emergency department, which sits off Nicolls Road near the Stony Brook University campus, serves about 25,000 patients annually out of a 4,200-square-foot facility, according to the health network.

The new facility will be more than 37,000 square feet when completed and outfitted with 20 treatment rooms and two critical care rooms, said Kali Chan, director of medicine media relations for Stony Brook Medicine.

Part of the new facility will be built on a former staff parking lot, said Sharon Meinster, assistant vice president of facilities planning and design at Stony Brook Medicine.

The new department will serve more than 35,000 patients per year, according to the release.

Stony Brook plans to expand its team of physicians, pediatricians and nurses to accommodate the new facility. Chan did not specify the number of employees to be hired, but said the hospital network anticipated “greatly expanding staff.”

Stony Brook opened its pediatric emergency department in 2010, and later that year officially opened its children’s hospital, Newsday reported at the time. In the years since, the county’s population has grown, rising from 1.49 million people in 2010 to 1.53 million by 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2019, the hospital network opened a four-floor addition to the children’s hospital as part of a $450 million expansion that also included a cancer center.

About $21 million of the construction costs of the new pediatric emergency department come from nearly 200 donors, including the family of Peter and Nancy Richard. Peter Richard, the former president of the P.C. Richard & Son, established the fund to expand the pediatric emergency department, according to Stony Brook University.

A larger emergency room also will allow the hospital to fit more parents who accompany children on their visits, said Milana, the physician in chief.

Additional capacity also can help emergency rooms treat kids with complex injuries who often need to go to emergency rooms rather than urgent care centers or other facilities, said Wendy Darwell, president and CEO of the Hauppauge-based Suburban Hospital Alliance of New York State, which represents hospitals and health systems.

“Emergency room volume over the last decade hasn’t really changed,” Darwell said. “However, the patients that are being seen in emergency rooms tend to be much more complex.”

But Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president for health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York, said health networks should be more focused on investing in care in local communities, rather than large hospitals.

“What we should be investing in is primary care and pediatric care in the community,” Benjamin said. “The state continues to over invest in hospitals at a huge cost of having community-based accessible, available pediatricians, pediatric mental health practitioners [and] primary care physicians.”