Growing up with a neuromuscular disease, Emilee Lund became accustomed to the white walls of antiseptic hospital rooms.

Lund, 29, who uses a wheelchair and moved to the Twin Cities a decade ago for art school, was more than happy to see the interior of the Gillette Children’s Specialty Center’s newly renovated fifth floor decorated with art work, including some of her own, as well as carpeted therapeutic play areas hosting puppets and toys, and exam rooms outfitted with soft wall lighting that changes color and intensity to offer kids visual distractions.

Beyond aesthetics, the center’s fifth-floor bathrooms now all come equipped with adult-sized changing tables that shift in height for easy access from a wheelchair. Elsewhere on the floor, three different types of clinical labs — a collaborative research lab, a research wet lab and a neuromodulation lab — will offer seamless connection for physicians and their young patients enrolled in clinical trials for new devices, completing blood work and undergoing cutting-edge care in brain and spinal therapies.

Growing up in Wisconsin, medical visits “were very enclosed and hospital-like,” said Lund, an adult patient of Gillette Children’s Hospital and Clinics for the past decade. “Time has really changed for inclusiveness, and just making sure (facilities) touch on everyone’s disability. The sensory wall was a nice touch. It doesn’t feel like a clinic.”

First patients

Gillette officials on Tuesday will welcome the first patients to the hospital’s new fifth floor care areas, which replace former administrative space within the multi-level specialty center at University and Jackson streets in downtown St. Paul.

Next door, the Gateway Plaza — a new hospital addition, which took the spot of a now-demolished administrative building — opened in 2022, complete with an inclusive, all-abilities playground on the fourth floor, inside the parking ramp.

The $7 million specialty center renovation includes 12 exam rooms, a drop-in computer room outfitted with 24 dual-screen workstations and four quiet rooms open to employees across departments, multiple outpatient pediatric psychological therapy and recreation rooms, play spaces, lactation areas and the three dedicated research labs with customized equipment storage.

“If kids want to play adaptive sports, or participate in adaptive painting or art, it’s big enough they can bring in gear, such as an adaptive bicycle so they can test it out and customize it,” said Nick Hanson, a hospital spokesperson. “And they can store it.”

Three types of lab space, cutting-edge clinical trials

Officials said U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum was instrumental in securing $1.5 million in federal spending toward the research labs, which include a hydraulic ceiling lift and cameras to help determine the pain levels of non-verbal patients, among other tools to assess motor control and movement disorders. The goal is to develop the latest equipment for children’s specialty care, including biofeedback, robotic and exoskeleton devices.

The gulf between testing a concept or device in a clinical lab and rolling it out for widespread use can take 17 years or more — in other words, an entire childhood — a frustration to medical experts like Dr. Jennifer Laine, an orthopedic surgeon who also is the medical director of Research at Gillette Children’s. Lining up patients, practitioners and sizable new laboratories directly across the hall from each other will hopefully speed up that process while improving patient care, she said.

“It’s really about increasing efficiency, having better quality of the space … and it will really enhance patient and family inclusion,” said Laine, during a tour of the fifth floor renovation on Monday. “We think that it’s really important that the research that we do here is clinically relevant to our patients and families.”

Changing stations

Sarah St. Louis recalled how her son survived a traumatic brain injury from a car accident when he was just 20 months old. As he grew, it became harder to transfer him to diaper changing stations — he wasn’t potty-trained until he was 6 or 7 — a feat that, at 13, is now virtually impossible. In 2019, she set about helping to write legislation requiring that all new or newly renovated, publicly-accessible restrooms with six or more bathroom fixtures feature adjustable, adult-sized changing tables.

The bill was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz a year ago last May. On Tuesday, St. Louis, of Minnetonka, proudly flipped one of the specialty center’s new bathroom changing tables down from its wall attachment and used a hand-held device to lower it to wheelchair height, readying it for the next bathroom user.

That bathroom user could very well be Felix, the 7-year-old son of Haley Brunell, who runs Gillette’s family engagement research program, which ran key aspects of the new specialty center renovation by patients and their families before construction. Brunell showed off a photo of her son, who suffers from a rare genetic disorder, laying cramped inside a tiny tot-sized changing station.

“My kid is only 40 pounds,” she said. “We’re talking about some kids who are 70 pounds. Gillette is really going to set the standard for how this should be done.”

Treating children with disabilities

Founded in 1897, Gillette bills itself as the nation’s first public hospital specifically dedicated to treating children who have disabilities, and it partners with Regions Hospital to operate the state’s first Level 1 pediatric trauma center for critically injured children and teens.

The independent, nonprofit medical system saw some 28,000 unique patients last year across 11 hospitals, clinics and specialty offices statewide, including the Phalen Clinic on St. Paul’s Phalen Boulevard, which caters to adults.

That caseload included 4,000 patients with cerebral palsy and roughly the same number of spinal care patients, as well as 11,900 virtual care visits.

Related Articles

St. Paul man, 24, dies more than a week after being shot at University and Rice

Readers and writers: A Red Balloon anniversary, and a new home for Mystery Night

Funding, zoning questions dog St. Paul ‘Familiar Faces’ homeless project on Marshall Avenue

Como Zoo & Conservatory: Sunken Garden at Marjorie McNeely Conservatory closed through holidays for accessibility improvements

St. Paul police shooting: Body cam footage shows encounter with armed homicide suspect