Phoenix Children's Hospital has provided hope, healing and the best healthcare for children and families since 1983. Today, Phoenix Children's is one of the ten largest children's hospitals in the country and provides specialty and sub-specialty inpatient, outpatient, trauma, emergency and urgent care to children and families in Arizona and throughout the Southwest.
History Of Phoenix Children's Hospital
Explore our historical timeline in celebration of Phoenix Children's 25th anniversary.
If you have a story about a special moment in our history, you can share it on the site.
Background
The idea for a Phoenix Children's Hospital was born in 1978 when members of the Maricopa Pediatric Society began discussing the need for a kids-only hospital. Phoenix was the ninth largest metropolitan area in the country with excellent health care facilities in some 23 hospitals. But while most of them offered some type of pediatric care, the pediatricians knew this was not good enough. A children's hospital was needed.
Then a bold idea was proposed: to locate the children's hospital on the campus of an existing hospital, thereby saving enormous sums of money and gaining an efficiency of resource use that was well ahead of its time.
Phoenix Children's Hospital opened within Good Samaritan in 1983 and operated as an independent hospital there for almost 20 years. Facing steady growth and an opportunity to establish its own campus, Phoenix Children's purchased a 22-acre site originally occupied by the Phoenix Regional Medical Center in 1999 to build a free-standing children's hospital. Phoenix Children's began operations as a freestanding, specialized pediatric hospital in May 2002.
Today, Phoenix Children's is the only free-standing pediatric hospital in Arizona and one of the 10 largest hospitals of its kind in the United States.
