When Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt opened in Nashville 20 years ago, the mission was to create a brightly colored, welcoming facility for children and their families to receive compassionate, quality health care delivered by teams specially trained to care for all children.
Understanding that children aren’t small adults, Monroe Carell’s teams expanded their health care footprint over the past decade to bring those same specialty pediatric services across Tennessee and beyond. Monroe Carell now has more than 30 off-site and affiliated locations, including several long-standing partnerships with regional hospitals.
One of the largest site expansions was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where in December 2019 a new 37,000-square-foot facility opened: Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital Vanderbilt Surgery and Clinics Murfreesboro.
The largest pediatric off-campus expansion since the freestanding hospital opened in Nashville, Monroe Carell’s Murfreesboro facility recently marked five years, celebrating the team’s work of caring for children over nearly 194,000 visits, including surgeries, clinic visits, gastrointestinal procedures, urgent care visits and imaging studies.
“I am so delighted to celebrate this special milestone for our Monroe Carell teams” said Meg Rush, MD, MMHC, president of Monroe Carell. “What started as a paper exercise quickly moved to a vision and then to a reality in five years’ time. Our mission is to give hope and healing to children and their families in the best way possible. Our services in Murfreesboro have accomplished this. I am so grateful to everyone, past and present, who shaped the vision, launched the plan and worked tirelessly to deliver safe, quality care to those who need it. Congratulations!”
The single-story facility, located at 2102 West Northfield Blvd., features 22 multispecialty clinic rooms, urgent care services, a suite of operating rooms, imaging capabilities (such as MRI, X-ray and ultrasound), audiology booths for hearing tests and procedural areas.
In addition to care options, the team at the Murfreesboro facility has also been able to incorporate community activities and events including Leadership Rutherford with the Chamber of Commerce and car seat fitting sessions for families. The facility also added an on-site hub for the Neonatal and Pediatric Transport team to serve the southeastern region as well.
More than 15 pediatric subspecialities provide care in Murfreesboro, which include gastroenterology, general surgery, orthopaedics, otolaryngology, audiology and urology.
“We began a journey more than a decade ago to take our resources from our Nashville campus and spread them across the region to give children and families what they want and deserve: to bring our pediatric providers closer to where they work, live and play, and to make access to our quality, compassionate services easier,” said John W. Brock III, MD, surgeon-in-chief emeritus and Monroe Carell Jr. Professor. “Murfreesboro is a dream realized and carried out by remarkable health care teams dedicated to children. I feel privileged to be a part of the team that helped make this possible for our families.”
Much like the main Monroe Carell hospital, which has a bright and airy feel, Murfreesboro was thoughtfully designed for families as well as for doctors, nurses and staff delivering care — the same nationally ranked quality care families get in Nashville.
The building is divided into three distinct sections — the surgical suite, the radiology imaging center and the multispecialty exam rooms — with each area identifiable by different colors. A hallway that runs from end to end through the center of the building connects each zone to allow for smooth transitions throughout. The waiting rooms have sensory play areas for children.
The surgical suite has three outpatient operating rooms, 14 pre- and postoperative bays, an isolation room, an IV start room, consultation rooms and a dedicated surgical patient exit area in the back of the building to make postsurgical discharges and pickup easy for families. Nearly 12,000 surgeries have been performed at the Murfreesboro facility since opening, and that includes a five-week pause on surgeries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The surgical team has also earned high patient satisfaction ratings — 94% — which is among the highest across all Vanderbilt University Medical Center operative sites.
“Monroe Carell’s Murfreesboro facility brings the highest standards of excellence to our community, close to where many of our families live, while maintaining the unwavering commitment to stellar pediatric surgical care in an ambulatory setting that is synonymous with the Monroe Carell brand,” said Jeffrey Upperman, MD, surgeon-in-chief of Monroe Carell, chair of the Department of Pediatric Surgery and vice chair for Pediatric Surgical Services in the Section of Surgical Sciences. “Our specialized teams are dedicated to delivering compassionate, cutting-edge precision care that ensures the best outcomes for our young patients. We look forward to continuing to grow and serve this community.”
