Plan to build new Lurie children’s hospital in Downers Grove approved by state board
Lurie Children’s Hospital may move forward with building a new, highly anticipated children’s hospital in Downers Grove, after a state board voted to approve Lurie’s plan for the facility Thursday.
The Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board voted unanimously Thursday to allow Lurie to proceed with building the facility — the last approval needed for the project.
The $480 million hospital is planned to have 48 beds, six operating rooms, an emergency department and space for outpatient care. It will be located near the intersection of I-355 and Butterfield Road and could open in 2030.
The new facility will be Lurie’s first hospital with inpatient beds outside of its main location in Streeterville.
Though the new hospital would be significantly smaller than Lurie’s hospital in Streeterville, it’s expected to give people in the western suburbs an option for care that’s closer to home.
Now, about 47% of children in the western suburbs leave their communities if they need overnight hospital care, according to Lurie.
About 20% of Lurie’s inpatients now come from the western suburbs, Dr. Tom Shanley, Lurie President and CEO, told the board Thursday.
“Behind every one of those numbers is a child who needs care and a family that’s navigating the added stress of travel, time away from work, time away from school and disruption of their daily life,” Shanley said. “We believe we can, and frankly should, make that experience much better for them.”
The hospital will be for patients who are low-acuity, meaning patients who don’t need the highest, most complex level of care, which is offered at Lurie’s Chicago hospital. It would be ideal, for example, for children with respiratory illnesses who may need monitoring and extra oxygen, children who are dehydrated, and those who have infections that require antibiotics administered via an IV.
The hospital will, however, have a helipad in case patients need to quickly be transferred via helicopter to Lurie’s downtown hospital.
The board also voted unanimously Thursday to allow Lurie to close its Westchester outpatient facility once the Downers Grove hospital is open. Lurie plans to relocate the services at that facility to the new children’s hospital.
Board members praised Lurie’s plan for the new hospital Thursday, including Gary Kaatz, who called it “a significant transformational intitaive.”
“I think there’s going to be a lot of benefit for a lot of people,” Kaatz said as he voted yes.
Lurie’s plans for the new hospital also drew support from a number of other individuals and organizations in recent months, including the Itasca-based American Academy of Pediatrics, local pediatricians and families of children with medical issues who said having a hospital in Downers Grove will make their lives easier.
“While the quality of care has always been exceptional, the logistics can be exhausting,” one Hinsdale mother wrote in a letter of support to the board, of taking her child to appointments in Streeterville and at other Lurie outpatient locations across the Chicago area. “A relatively brief appointment can easily consume half a day or more when accounting for travel, traffic and time away from school and work.”
One Riverside father wrote that his family has had to make several emergency trips to Lurie downtown for his son. “Fortunately, we’ve made it safely to Lurie Children’s each time but the drive downtown in an emergent situation is always stressful, but we knew that the quality of care demanded it,” he wrote.
The new Downers Grove hospital should also help to take pressure off Lurie’s Streeterville hospital, taking some of the overnight patients that might normally stay there, Lurie leaders said Thursday.
While Lurie has added many medical and intensive care unit beds to its Streeterville hospital over the years, it will be out of room to add more to that location by the end of the decade, said Dr. Marcelo Malakooti, chief medical officer at Lurie.
“This will improve access for families while creating additional capacity at the Streeterville campus for those children who need the most complex and highly specialized care,” Malakooti said.
Approval of the new hospital comes as community hospitals across the Chicago area have been closing their pediatric inpatient units, often citing low numbers of patients. More procedures can now be done without an overnight hospital stay, and many patients in need of care go to large children’s hospitals such as Lurie, UChicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital and Advocate Children’s Hospital.
Pediatric inpatient units also are not typically big moneymakers for hospitals.
In the Chicago area, 27 hospitals have shuttered their pediatric units since 2013, according to Lurie’s application to the board.
In fact, the same day that the board approved the new children’s hospital, it also voted 8-1 to approve the closure of the pediatric unit at St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet. Prime Healthcare, which bought the hospital last year, said it wanted to close the unit because it had one or fewer patients each day “which raised concerns regarding the quality of care that could be provided,” according to the hospital’s application to the board to shutter the unit.
St. Joseph said in April 2025 that it was temporarily suspending pediatric inpatient care, drawing criticism at the time from the Illinois Nurses Association, which represents nurses at the hospital.
Members of SEIU Healthcare Illinois also attended the meeting Wednesday, with many criticizing hospital closures of services lines, including pediatric and labor and delivery units. St. Joseph in Joliet was also one of three Prime Illinois hospitals to suspend labor and delivery services last month.
The board’s vote Thursday allows Prime to permanently close its pediatrics unit.
If kids need inpatient or specialized care, St. Joseph has an agreement to transfer them to Endeavor Health Edward Hospital in Naperville, which is about 20 miles away. Inpatient pediatric services are also offered at Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox, about nine miles away
Representatives of Prime and St. Joseph who attended the meeting Wednesday said it’s necessary to close the pediatric unit to ensure quality care and to help the hospital — which is still losing money — stay open for the long term.
“Part of the reason health care is in crisis and hospitals are in crisis is everyone tried to do everything,” Dr. Sunil Patel, regional chief medical officer for Prime Healthcare in Illinois, told the board. “We just need to focus on what we can do and what we can do well.”
lschencker@chicagotribune.com