Sanderson Tower at Children’s of Mississippi Now Open
By: Sara B. Robertson, M.D.
It’s been several years in the making but the Kathy and Joe Sanderson Tower at Children’s of Mississippi opened the first week of November, and the anesthesiology department could not be more thrilled! With its opening, a world-class children’s hospital will match the skills of University of Mississippi Medical Center professionals. The result is bringing the best pediatric care close to home for Mississippi families.
The Sanderson Tower, named for Sanderson Farms CEO and board chair Joe Sanderson Jr. and his wife, Kathy, joins the Blair E. Batson Tower, named for UMMC’s first Pediatrics chair, in forming the state’s only children’s hospital.
The Sanderson Tower is a complement to the patient floors of Batson, adding clinical and more surgical space, a Pediatric Imaging Center and three floors of intensive care space for children who are critically ill or injured. The opening of the tower more than doubles the square footage devoted to pediatric care at UMMC.
The entirety of perioperative services has now moved into the Sanderson tower and includes twelve operating rooms, PACU, and ASU. This expands our pediatric anesthesia care by increasing our operating rooms by three and in less than a year will include the pediatric cath lab in the same area as the operating rooms. Having the imaging services separate from the adult hospital also allows less transport and the ability to recover from anesthesia in the children’s hospital.
We now boast nine pediatric anesthesiologists and fourteen nurse anesthetists. We have two pediatric anesthesia fellows each year, and also have three to four anesthesia residents who rotate with us each month. The residents complete four months on pediatric anesthesia throughout their residency. We also have two to three student nurse anesthetists who also rotate each month. We completed over 7600 anesthetics in fiscal year 2020. The opening of more operating rooms will mean more surgeries and more opportunities for our trainees to learn!
On October 13th, a ribbon cutting ceremony was held in front of the new tower to celebrate the opening. “We are so excited about today’s opening of the Kathy and Joe Sanderson Tower,” said Dr. LouAnn Woodward, vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine. “The Sanderson Tower will be vitally important to pediatric care not only for patients but in research and in the education of the next generation of pediatric experts.”
“The opening of this new facility means that the highest level of care will be there for the children of our state and for children yet to be born,” Joe Sanderson also said via video at the ceremony.
Watch the video below to see more about the Sanderson Tower at Children’s of Mississippi.