Tacoma’s new Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital, a $480 million, 250,000 square foot standalone pediatric campus, will start taking patients on May 16. Built on the site of the city’s first Mary Bridge hospital, the new tower brings a freestanding children’s hospital back to Tacoma roughly 30 years after operations moved into Tacoma General.
What’s inside the new building
The $480 million, 250,000 square foot hospital includes playrooms for younger kids, hangout and recreation spaces for teenagers, and patient rooms with separate dedicated space for family, according to KOMO. A media tour showed eight new operating rooms equipped with the latest technology and a child friendly “kitten scanner,” where kids can send a stuffed animal through a pretend scan to see how the real procedure works. Each floor is decorated with Pacific Northwest themes, and the facility adds more food options, including a self dispensing, salad bar style station.
Scale and regional reach
Mary Bridge serves more than 100,000 children a year and is the only Level II pediatric trauma center in Western Washington, according to KIRO. The outlet also reported the project’s final price tag landed at about $480 million after pandemic era supply chain delays and redesigns, and that the campus now includes a new medical office building to expand outpatient specialty clinics.
Timeline and campus impact
Plans for a standalone children’s hospital first surfaced in 2018, but the design was reworked after the COVID pandemic to address rising costs and lessons learned in clinical care, according to KOMO. “How do you design a space that feels whimsical but not too childish?” COO Ben Whitworth asked, as staff ran training simulations and final checks before the May 16 opening. Leaders say shifting Mary Bridge back into its own tower will open up space inside Tacoma General for adult patients and create room for future growth across the campus.
Context for Tacoma families
The opening comes on the heels of controversy. Mary Bridge scaled back its pediatric gender affirming clinic earlier this year, a move that drew criticism and was covered in a report on how the hospital pulled the plug on its gender clinic. Hospital leaders and donors say the new standalone tower is intended to improve access to pediatric care across Pierce County and to create more room for future growth on the Tacoma General campus.
