Our current Children’s Hospital measures a mere 8,500 sq m, with beds distributed 4-5 per room among only 27 rooms; for lack of an alternative, corridors are used as waiting rooms and as open storage space for medical supplies. Construction of the 9-story, 15,000 sq m Ruth (Rappaport) Children’s Hospital will provide improved physical and social conditions commensurate with Rambam pediatricians’ delivery of the highest quality medical care to the approximately 600,000 youngsters ages 0-18 who live in metropolitan Haifa and throughout northern Israel. Seven pediatric departments and units (subspecialties) still require large-scale funding of their own.
The medical center comprises 36 departments with some 1000 beds, 45 medical units, 9 institutes, 6 laboratories and 30 administrative and maintenance departments. Some of RHCC’s departments are the exclusive providers of comprehensive services for all of northern Israel, including trauma treatment, oncology, and neurosurgery.
As an academic hospital, RHCC also maintains vital teaching and research links with the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, providing a dynamic clinical environment for diagnosis, treatment and research.
Donor’s Vision
To their vision for the Ruth Children’s Hospital, the Rappaport family has brought deep, respectful insights into the needs of youngsters and parents. They have called for a building whose design:
- Places the child and parents at the center of a holistic healing process
- Facilitates a return to family medicine’s emphasis on the personal relationship between doctor and patient
- Is colorful and emphasizes comfort and serenity
- Balances youngsters’ needs for both privacy and access to the outside world, recognizing the contribution of both to children’s cognitive, emotional and social development
- Relates to the hospital environment as inseparable from both the surrounding community and the hospital’s natural setting – in Rambam’s case, the adjacent Mediterranean Sea with its capacity for soothing and healing the soul
Architect’s Vision
The new hospital will be approached from the southeast through healing gardens. From this angle, its aluminum-cladded, glass-curtained façade is meant to suggest a simple, white box (perhaps even a toy box) whose sheer front will partially reveal the activities within. Three exposed pillars — painted or cladded in red, green and blue to suggest the children’s game of jackstraws — will rise 7 flights to support the building’s cantilevered uppermost 2 floors, which will close the top of the box like an overhanging lid.
Pediatric Departments & Units
Among the Ruth Hospital’s 7 departments and units (subspecialties) requiring large-scale funding of their own for interior construction and the purchase and installation of furnishings and medical equipment are the following:
- Center for Juvenile Diabetes & Obesity
- Child Development Center
- Pediatric Cardiology Unit
- Pediatric Emergency Department & Outpatient Clinic
- Pediatric Hemato-Oncology Department
- Pediatric Nephrology Center
- Pediatric & Adolescent Psychiatry Department