Children’s Hospital Will Be Built in South County : Health care: CHOC and Mission medical center will develop the new, 52-bed facility to serve the fast-growing area.

A new children’s hospital to serve the rapidly growing South County area will open next year under an agreement reached by two Orange County hospitals, officials said Monday.

Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center have agreed to develop “Children’s Hospital at Mission,” a 52-bed facility that will be located next to Mission Hospital at Crown Valley Parkway and Medical Center Drive, officials said. The new hospital will operate as a separate, not-for-profit business under the auspices of CHOC’s board of directors.

The new organization will take over Mission’s existing pediatrics, neonatal intensive care and pediatric intensive care units on Jan. 1. Then in mid-1992, it will move into its permanent location on the fifth floor of the five-story tower that Mission is building on its property, officials said. The cost of opening the new hospital is estimated at $6 million.

It is not yet known how many doctors and nurses will staff the new hospital, officials said, but they added that the plan is to serve the growing areas of Mission Viejo, Laguna Niguel and surrounding communities.

Reynold R. Welch, Mission Hospital’s president and chief executive officer, said the new hospital is necessary because CHOC’s Orange facility is not readily available to South County residents.

“We are responding to physician and family requests and, frankly, we are trying to keep up with the growth in our community,” Welch said. “By the end of this century, if not before, there will be more than 500,000 people in the South County area. We have tried to emphasize women’s and children’s services, and we felt, frankly, that pediatrics was one area where we could do more and wanted to do more.”

Jim Larson, CHOC’s chief operating officer, said that CHOC’s facility in Orange already serves many South County residents and that physicians had cited the need to locate a specialized children’s hospital closer to the South County population center.

“This new location will help us fulfill our mission of providing pediatric care to all of the children of Orange County,” he said.

Officials said that while the new hospital will be much smaller than CHOC’s 202-bed Orange facility, it will have much of the same equipment and facilities, and doctors will be able to perform most of the same procedures.

CHOC is the only hospital in the county that treats strictly children. It treats patients from birth through age 18 and offers treatment in such medical specialties as cardiology, neurology, infectious disease and oncology.

“We will be able to treat every kind of illness that we now treat at our Orange facility with the exception of bone-marrow transplants,” which are used to treat leukemia, CHOC spokeswoman Maureen Williams said. “Those transplants require isolation rooms that will not be available at Mission.”

Welch said negotiations between Mission and CHOC took several months.

“We looked around and recognized that CHOC is the leader in children’s medicine locally and that it makes sense both for the (Mission Hospital) and the community to have them here,” he said.