When Erik Hamnes arrives at work these days he pulls right up to the front door
of his clinic, stoops to pick up loose nails as he crosses the walk and once
inside the door, he steps to the right and onto a sticky blue pad to remove the
dust from his shoes.
“The dust is everywhere,” Hamnes said. “We have to clean everything regularly because the dust just gets in.”
Well, that’s just part of the price of working in the midst of a construction site. Hamnes
is director of Pediatric Rehabilitation, the first—and so far only—clinic that is open and operating at Vanderbilt Health at One Hundred Oaks.
“Aside from the construction all around us, it really has been great,” Hamnes said. “We were concerned families might get lost finding their way out here at the
beginning, but they say it
hasn’t been bad. The staff was worried about the move—after all, this is far away from all the amenities we’ve been used to on the Medical Center campus.”
Pediatric Rehabilitation opened its doors in February 2008. The move effectively
transformed their clinic from a location their patient families refer to as “the basement” at the Vanderbilt Clinics, to a colorful, pinwheel-layout, design that looks
and feels like a series of playgrounds.
“When you walk in here, you go ‘Wow, this is really for kids,’” said Elizabeth Doolittle. “The point is that kids should feel like they are at play, not at work.”
Doolittle’s son Jake spent a couple of weeks in a private rehabilitation clinic in the
Atlanta area after his medical recovery from a traumatic brain injury. Then the
family was able to return home to Nashville, first to the old location, and now
the new Vanderbilt Pediatric Rehabilitation location at One Hundred Oaks.
“This is what we expected,” Doolittle said, looking around the central waiting area at the One Hundred Oaks
clinic. Her family did not quite expect the “basement” feel of the older clinic and were grateful when the new facility opened, she
said.
