Emergency rooms aren’t supposed to be happy places, are they? But most sick kids (and their parents) could use a little cheering up. Beginning December 1, nearly all of the 10,000 children each year who come to the Emergency Department shared by Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and Stanford Hospital & Clinics will be directed to a new Pediatric Emergency Department, which combines Packard Children's trademark kid-friendly atmosphere with a coterie of Pediatric Emergency Medicine specialists equipped to handle any medical problem.

The new kids-only space — one of only two pediatric emergency departments in the Bay Area — is brightly lit and colorful, with whimsical patterns in the floor and artwork taken from familiar children’s books on the walls. Light maple wood and lots of internal windows surrounding a central nursing station give a sense of spaciousness, and each of the seven exam rooms has a television and a new iMac computer preloaded with children’s games, music, movies and internet access. A big screen television in the waiting room will show short cartoons and informational materials.

This new department functions under the auspices of the current emergency facility, but the construction of the space was a true team effort: Packard Children's Hospital, Stanford Hospital & Clinics, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and more than 50 individual donors from the community banded together to make a child’s trip to the emergency room less scary and more productive. “No physician can do an adequate lung or abdominal exam on a screaming child,” says Bernard Dannenberg, MD, Packard Children's Hospital’s first Davies Family Endowed Director of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, who emphasized that children are much more likely than adults to be bewildered, anxious and stressed when brought to the Emergency Department. “We are now able to reduce a child’s anxiety through play and distractions such as movies and games, which allows us to get a better exam and ultimately arrive at the answer we need much faster.”

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