The Children’s Cancer Hospital was built on a budget created and funded solely through private donations. It provides a new standard of healthcare excellence for the children of Egypt by blending the desired U.S. model of healthcare delivery with the region’s local practices and culture.

The hospital accommodates 178 inpatients and is designed to expand both vertically and horizontally, doubling in size as needs and space demand. The campus master plan also incorporates a 90,000-sq.-ft. municipal park and a 150-space, subgrade parking design. This facility is the second-largest hospital in the world dedicated exclusively to pediatric cancer care.

From a distance, the building’s large exterior structural screens resemble sails atop vessels navigating the Nile River. Mounted on the outside skin of the bed towers, these metaphoric forms are functional, providing shade and energy conservation for this fully sealed glass building.

Project category: New construction (completed March 2006)

Chief administrator: Sherif Aboul Naga, MD, Client Representative, Professor of Pediatric Oncology, National Cancer Institute

Firm: Jonathan Bailey Associates, (469) 227-3900

Design team: Jonathan Bailey, FAIA, RIBA, Principal, Lead Designer; Alain Beaini, Lead Designer (Jonathan Bailey Associates); Local Consultant, Architecture, Structural/Civil Engineering, Hamza Associates; MEP Engineer, BR+A Consulting Engineers; Local MEP Consulting, Shaker Consultancy Group; Contractor, Skanska International AB

Total building area (sq. ft.): 401,434

Construction cost/sq. ft.: $162

Total construction cost (excluding land): $65,000,000

For the very first time, children and families of Egypt and the Middle East will experience state-of-the art Western standards of technology and care through sensory design, which in effect is the visual imagery that compels patients, staff, and families to experience a calming effect upon entering a place of medicine. The five elements behind sensory design are sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Playfulness and positive distraction, critical to pediatric treatment and recovery, are apparent throughout. These elements help to alleviate young patients’ and their parents’ fears and anxieties. Treatment and recovery are achieved by combining medical-surgical care with a regionally sensitive and playful atmosphere comprised of art, activities, and education.

The hospital’s unique “cloverleaf” layout for the nursing unit is highly flexible. It allows for all three nursing substations, all in view of each other, to be adaptable for service changes and supported by the central nursing station. The clinics are integrated both horizontally and vertically, allowing easy links to ancillary services. Each of the three 10-bed modules can change functions to provide critical medical, surgical, or hospice care. Handheld nursing technology gives caregivers more mobility and closer access to bedside activity. Convenient patient server rooms house medical records, supplies, medications, linens, and computer/phone workstations.

Additionally, the hospital features the first HEPA-filtered bone- marrow transplant unit in Egypt. It also houses four operating rooms, 25 treatment rooms, 32 infusion rooms (12 of them private), a PET scanner, an MRI room, a CT simulator, and two gamma cameras.