With a snip of oversized shears, a mother who gave birth to her first child at St. Luke’s Allentown Campus cut a ceremonial ribbon to open its new Women & Babies Pavilion. The expanded facility will increase the community’s access to high-quality birthing, post-partum and newborn services, including neonatal intensive care.
The five-story, 85,000 square-foot tower, built onto the east side of the hospital, will meet the growing patient needs for these services at this hospital campus.
The new addition, which doubled the size of the hospital’s previous unit, can accommodate several thousand patients a year.
Three floors of the wing are being put into service immediately. The second floor houses the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). LifeAire air purification technology creates an ultra-sterile, negative air flow environment on this unit to protect the tiny and often ill newborns, their parents and caregivers from infections.
The third floor’s Labor & Delivery Unit and fourth floor Post-partum Unit contain additional rooms and amenities, with each floor almost twice the size of the hospital’s former unit.
The building’s ground, first and fifth floors are shelled in for future use. Construction site preparation, and renovations to existing hospital “tie in” points, began in August 2022. Excavation work for the new tower began in November 2022, and the structure’s first steel beams were erected the following month.
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