Jacksonville is about to make statewide history. On June 11, the city will open the Dorion Family Pediatric Center inside the Earl B. Hadlow Center for Caring on Sunbeam Road, launching what local leaders say is Florida’s first hospice and palliative care facility built specifically for children. The donor-funded building is designed around kids with complex medical needs and their families, giving Community PēdsCare a permanent, child-centered home with play spaces, therapy rooms and places for families to gather. Staff say having everything under one roof should mean less time in the car and more time at the bedside, and families are already calling the new setup life-changing.
As reported by News4JAX, the Dorion Family Pediatric Center is being described as one of only a handful of pediatric hospice facilities in the country. It will serve as the new home base for Community PēdsCare, the pediatric hospice and palliative program that now supports more than 300 children across Northeast Florida.
Services Built For Kids And Families
The Dorion Center is set up to pull a wide range of services into one kid-friendly hub, instead of scattering them across living rooms and waiting rooms around the region. The plan is to centralize music therapy, psychosocial and spiritual support, caregiver programs, therapeutic recreation and care coordination in a space organizers say feels more like a welcoming neighborhood center and less like a medical office. The Foundation of Community Hospice & Palliative Care says the facility is designed to grow programming and to carve out areas where siblings and parents can connect with others in similar situations, grab a breather, or join support groups. Leaders also hope that reducing the amount of time clinicians spend driving to home visits will open up more hours for direct care.
Family Experiences Set The Tone
For families already in the program, the brick and mortar building is just catching up to the impact they say they have felt for years. Antonina Nesterenko told News4JAX that music therapy through Community PēdsCare helped her son Andjay, who has cerebral palsy, build independence and eventually start walking. She called the new center “life-changing” and pointed to one standout memory: a visit arranged by the program where Andjay met Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence, a bright moment in a stretch that otherwise has not been easy.
Funding, Size And Local Context
The center is the result of a donor campaign that, according to the foundation, is intended to cover both construction and program expenses for the roughly 8,300-square-foot facility. Organizers previously reported raising about $6.6 million toward a goal of around $10 million. Reporting from Health News Florida notes that Community PēdsCare staff have spent hundreds of hours on the road in recent years driving to patients’ homes, a drain on time and energy that leaders say the new centralized location should ease. The Dorion Family Pediatric Center will operate inside Community Hospice's Earl B. Hadlow Center for Caring at 4266 Sunbeam Road in Mandarin, consistent with the hospice’s location listing.
How Families Can Connect
Community PēdsCare will keep providing in-home hospice and palliative care while using the Dorion Center for therapies, respite services and family-focused programs. Families looking for referrals or details about what is offered can visit Community PēdsCare online or call Community Hospice for intake and scheduling. More background on the center and the donor campaign behind it is available through the foundation and local health news outlets cited above.
