Children’s Hospital expands urgent and specialty care in southeast Aurora

AURORA | The colorful halls of Children’s Hospital’s newest urgent care and outpatient clinic in Aurora doesn’t look like a place anyone would associate with pain or sickness.

That’s the point, hospital officials said as they opened the new facility to patients last week.

The project is a renovated building on the corner of Smoky Hill and E-470 near Southlands and replaces a similar and much smaller urgent care facility in Parker. The center opened Aug. 21 and has already treated hundreds of patients.

After more than a year and a half of work was done on the former SCL Medical building, the new Children’s location offers 20 pediatric specialties, 16 specialty clinic exam rooms, 11 urgent care exam rooms, seven orthopedic and rehab exam rooms and a large physical therapy room. Not missing? There’s a complete small outdoor turf field and basketball hoop across nearly 39,500 square feet of space.

Compare that with the old Parker facility’s 10,000 square feet and a much more favorable location in Aurora. In total, the facility aims to serve thousands of local children in the Aurora area.

“We just pushed our doors out into a community where there’s lots of kids who need access to care. We try to put these locations in areas where we know it’s easier for families to be able to get care, and it’s not so complicated; they don’t have to navigate a huge parking lot or a giant building,” Suzy Jaeger, Senior Vice President and chief patient experience and access officer of Children’s Hospital Colorado, told the Sentinel. “It’s really just about trying to bring our services out into the community to make them easier for families to access and provide kids with the type of specialty care they need.”

Of the 20 specialties and features provided at the Aurora location, nine were added or expanded upon from the former Parker location, most notably including ophthalmology with in-clinic eyeglass retail and in-house phlebotomy and lab testing.

With additional space to play with, Children’s was able to vastly improve the lives of its providers as well. In addition to a staff-only entrance, the new location boasts numerous, spacious work areas for nurses and staff to meet with each other or tuck themselves away to focus on documentation or individual tasks.

Little details, including glass walls separating those work areas from patient rooms, ergonomic chairs for certain departments and adult-sized changing tables in bathrooms, came directly from patient and employee input from other locations during research for the new facility.

“We talked a lot with our providers and the extended members of their care team and this room is a great example of that,” Jaeger said as she spoke in one of the large work areas — ‘fish bowls,’ as team members have dubbed the glass offices. “What we’ve learned by talking with our physicians and observing them in action is that they really want to be with their team, come into this room and they want to talk to medical assistants, nurses and the physician to develop a plan of care for the patient. Before, they’d have to go find them in different spaces and it would take longer.

“Because it would take longer and there were those barriers, they might not actually spend the time talking to them. So the experience of the patient wouldn’t be as good and the experience of the team and that cohesion of working together would not be as effective as it is in this environment.”

The space in and around the building offers a much better flow of operation for patients and staff, such as dedicated entrances, an ambulance bay in the back directly connected to the urgent care and loading docks for supplies out of the way of patients.

In the future, Jaeger said the new facility can “easily double” the amount of visits the Parker location received per year.

Additionally, she hopes to educate the community on the differences between an urgent care and an emergency department, and when to use one or the other.

The Parker location was situated next to AdventHealth, an emergency department, which paved the way for various issues. For example, under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, anyone who enters an emergency room seeking care must be treated or given a Medical Screen Exam, even if the problem did not warrant an ER visit and could be treated at an urgent care. Not to mention the out-of-pocket cost for an ER visit versus an urgent care visit.

Moving away from the Parker location partially remedies the issue of being located next to an emergency department, but Jaeger stressed the importance of educating the community. More information and a helpline for when to utilize an ER or urgent care can be found on the Children’s Hospital website.