$50 million 'whimsy and wonder': St. Jude's Family Commons to transform patient experience
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The dragonflies are made of stained glass. The rocking chairs are shaped like pigs. The ukuleles are in rows, poised to come to musical life when plucked by children's fingers.
That will happen Tuesday, when, for the first time, young patients at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital experience the facility's new Family Commons, a $50 million first-of-its-kind innovation in what Marlo Thomas calls "whimsy" and "wonder" that is intended to provide recreation, amusement and solace for families coping with the trauma of cancer.
Occupying all 45,000 square feet of the second floor of the four-story, 30-year-old Patient Care Center at the heart of the St. Jude campus, the Family Commons consists of 15 spaces — a music room, an art room, a café, even a hair salon with two fulltime stylists who will use safe "infection control" products — for patients, siblings, parents and other caregivers to relax or exercise mind and body in between the often stressful requirements of their various cancer treatments and therapies.
The idea is to "lessen the burden of the journey they have to take," said Dr. James R. Downing, president and CEO of St. Jude, the hospital founded by entertainer Danny Thomas in 1962 that is a leader in the fight against childhood catastrophic illness.
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Downing said patients often arrive at the hospital at 7:30 in the morning and have appointments and sessions with doctors that may last until 8 at night. The schedule has a lot of waiting-room downtime.
"They've been in every corner, they've sat in every chair, they've tried to lie down on every couch, looking for some respite," said Murphy MacDonald of IDEO, the company, founded in Palo Alto, California, that primarily designed the Commons.
To replace the typical waiting room-type environment with what Downing characterized as a sort of "town square" seems obvious, but Downing said the St. Jude Family Commons is the first effort of its kind on such a grand scale, in part because hospitals generally don't have a lot of room to devote to doctor-free activities. But St. Jude's ongoing building spree enabled the facility to move some medical offices to other locations, so the second floor could be gutted and transformed into the Commons.
Funded with a $50 million gift from AbbVie that ALSAC President and CEO Richard C. Shadyac Jr. said is the single biggest corporate donation in ALSAC history, the project has been planned for close to a decade. (ALSAC is the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.)
The idea is that patients and their families will spend time in the Commons between appointments; they also are welcome to hang out there even on other days, something that is more likely to occur when the 140-apartment Domino's Village, a residence for patients, opens across the street in early summer.
Those who do visit the Commons will find plenty of sources of comfort and distraction. The music room includes not just guitars, ukuleles, mandolins, percussion and a Steinway piano but a functional recording studio. The "Makerspace" has a 3D printer and other high-tech tools. A parent-oriented "In the Know" space is a community center to enable caregivers to share resources. A small preschool will enable youngsters to keep up their education.
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But the tools and the tech are matched by what Marlo Thomas — the actress and Danny Thomas' daughter who continues to serve as St. Jude's National Outreach Director — called "the whimsy, the wonder of it all," imagined in collaboration with artists from around the country.
A chapel-like "Sacred Space" showcases stained-glass dragonfly windows and a twinkling-star ceiling. The play area features a large blue elephant sculpted from soft plastic. Youngbood Studio in Memphis fabricated faux balloons, which appear to have floated up to the ceiling in the art room. A "Casual Care Center" includes tyke-sized rocking chair designed to resemble pink pigs and Lewis Carroll-esque stools that look like polka-dot mushrooms. Crucially, 19 "resting nooks" are refuges for families, like small hideaway living rooms — "a place of solace and normalcy," according to Thomas.
She said the "guiding mission of St. Jude is finding cures and saving children," but a complementary mission is "to keep alive the spirit" of those children. To this end, the Family Commons — its logo places the initials "FC" atop a crosshatch pattern intended to suggest a welcoming nest — is, despite its location, "unlike a hospital. A hospital is where we save lives, this community is where we live life."
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: St. Jude's Family Commons to transform patient experience: Here's how
