The 107,000-square-foot facility opened Jan. 7. | Photo Credit (all): Bonnie Ryan/Children‘s Nebraska
Behavioral health facilities present architects and builders with a difficult challenge: creating spaces that are safe for patients in crisis without making them feel institutional.
At Children’s Nebraska’s new $114 million Behavioral Health & Wellness Center in Omaha, project leaders said the answer was to design for healing and safety simultaneously rather than treating them as competing priorities.
“Sometimes when you only focus on safety, you engineer out all the things that actually help for healing,” said Renee Rafferty, Senior Vice President for Behavioral Health and Wellness at Children’s Nebraska, noting how the team met frequently during design and construction to stay on track with their mission. “We’ve learned that over time, really, those two things can exist at the same time.”…