Hospital’s Patient Transfer Was a Successful Operation : Health care: Using an underground tunnel, CHOC staff will spend two more days moving into a new 196-bed facility across the street.

The operation was as precise as a nurse handing a scalpel to a surgeon.

At daybreak Saturday, doctors, nurses and other medical staffers at Children’s Hospital of Orange County began manning their posts for the start of the delicate three-day maneuver--transferring about 135 patients from its outdated facilities through an underground tunnel and into a sparkling $45-million, 196-bed hospital.

Except for a few nicks and scratches caused by beds bumping into the walls of the new seven-story building, the first day of the move that included 48 children went as smoothly as expected and oftentimes was ahead of schedule.

“Where are we going to with Jose?” one nurse asked as 11-year-old Jose Sanchez of Santa Ana lay in his bed, waiting his turn to board the elevator.

“Wait! The I.V.,” another staffer said. “Wait! The rail guards,” warned another escort as they attempted to push the bed through the tight opening of the elevator.

But the youngster, like most others, took the organized chaos in stride.

With an arm draped over his head, he was all smiles and said that the only discomfort he felt was from the appendectomy he underwent last week.

Sitting up in her bed and wearing a Betty Boop T-shirt, 15-year-old Rebecca Lee used her arms to help pull the bed through the door of her old room as she departed for the new surroundings.

“I’m excited,” said Rebecca, who has cystic fibrosis. She figured this would be the better part of her hospital stay that will include the removal of her gallbladder.

Shelly Sluder, 14, also a cystic fibrosis patient, watched cartoons as she waited for movers to come get her. She had started packing Friday evening.

“I think it’s great,” she said, having already seen the brightly colored rooms in the new hospital. “I like it.”

The move to the new facility is a milestone for the nonprofit children’s hospital that began in 1964 in a 62-bed wing leased from St. Joseph Hospital.

Until now, the hospital had only 161 beds--caring for 99 patients in the CHOC Tower plus 62 additional beds in CHOC East, the leased St. Joseph Hospital space across the street.

While the hospital’s mission will remain the same--medical specialties including diabetes, cystic fibrosis and cancer--officials decided that the new facility was needed after recognizing the inefficiency and inadequacy of the older buildings’ design.

The CHOC Tower, for example, has 10-foot-high ceilings and cannot accommodate modern medical equipment. The new hospital has 17-foot-high ceilings.

Administrators hired a consultant and spent the past year planning for the move to the new facility. A 150-page document detailed every step to be taken by staffers and listed contingency plans for unexpected events, ranging from medical emergencies to an earthquake.

“We had time trials to see how long it took to move (patients) from the farthest point, down through the tunnel, and to have them in a bed” in the new room, said Brian Mottishaw, vice president of general services.

Administrative offices were moved Friday, and the pharmacy was moved after midnight, when the least amount of drugs are dispensed, Mottishaw said.

Shortly after 6 a.m. Saturday, with twice the usual staff on duty at the hospital, officials began moving the first group of patients. Instead of the expected 10-minute-per-patient transfer time, the operation took about seven minutes, officials said.

Children with cancer and blood disorders and those from the medical surgical ward were the first to be moved Saturday. Patients in CHOC Tower were scheduled to be transferred today and Monday.

“It’s a short move,” said Dr. Mitchell S. Cairo, director of the hospital’s bone marrow transplantation and hematology/oncology research department. “Sometimes they (patients) have to go this far to get an X-ray or scan done in a hospital. So the length of the move is not that out of proportion to other kinds of things they do on a daily basis.”

The beds carried more than the patients. Bags carrying intravenous fluids and monitors, oxygen tanks, the patients’ medical records and personal belongings also were placed on the beds to minimize disorder.

Buena Park resident David Johnson, 7, carried his stegosaurus poster with him.

And Cole Wilson, a 2-year-old cancer patient, loaded up his bed with stuffed toys, including Ernie, the Muppets character, and “Little Eesh,” the name he gave to a piece of cloth torn off his sheepskin blanket.

“It’s our love,” said his mother, Cindy Wilson. “It (the cloth) wore off and he carries it everywhere.”

Parents were asked to be with their children at the time of the transfer, said Dr. Geni A. Bennetts, hematology/oncology director, “so that the child would not feel they were being absconded with and taken away.”

Six staffers on two-way radios were posted along the short route, using a relay system to report the patients’ progress from one building to the next.

Traffic controllers also delayed other staffers moving children’s toys, scales, bed pans and other medical supplies if a child was en route.

Once in the new rooms, monitors were quickly reconnected and the children went back to being patients.

Beatrice Flores, 9, of Garden Grove sat in bed as her mother, Magdalena Gomez, brushed her long, dark hair. Her roommate, 7-year-old Brenda Cardenas of Huntington Beach, began working on a 1,000-piece puzzle.

And 2-year-old Chelsea McMillan, who suffers from a low blood platelet count, walked down the hallway with her mother, showing disappointment when she found the door locked to the new Recreation Therapy Room.

Cairo said parents were encouraged to surround their children with familiar toys and objects for their first night in the new surroundings--and to possibly spend the night there themselves. “I think it will be a little different,” he said, “but most of the kids will have their parents with them tonight.”