Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford Gifted $100M

The money, a gift from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, will pay for renovations to the hospital's West building.

Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford has been gifted $100 million to modernize its obstetrics and neonatal care venues in Palo Alto.

The money, a gift from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, will pay for renovations to the hospital’s West building, which opened in 1991, and which is the only pediatric care venue in the Bay Area to offer obstetric, neonatal, and developmental medicine services in one place.

"It's vital that more mothers and babies have access to Packard Children's Hospital, in an enhanced environment that supports optimal physical and mental well-being," says Yasser El-Sayed, MD, obstetrician-in-chief at Stanford Children’s Health. "This reimagined space will also facilitate impactful scientific research studies, which will accelerate our commitment to advance maternal and infant health in California and beyond."

Nearly two-thirds of expectant mothers at Lucile Packard are high-risk, with patients coming from across the state, the nation, and the world for treatment. The renovations will expand the labor and delivery unit, adding capacity for up to 20% more births. The building will also house the hospital’s first-ever dedicated and physically separate unit for high-risk moms who need to be hospitalized for days, weeks, or months before they deliver, ensuring rapid access to a state-of-the-art obstetric delivery suite.

The neonatal intensive care units will transition from large, open rooms—which typically hold up to 10 babies, their parents and care teams, and medical equipment—to private rooms where parents can stay with their babies.

Key upgrades include:

• 14 private labor rooms in a new labor and delivery unit
• 9 private antepartum rooms in a specially designed unit 
• 51 private postpartum rooms 
• 64 private NICU rooms  
• 3 new and state-of-the-art obstetric operating rooms 
• A streamlined, family-centered experience, starting with a welcoming lobby  

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has donated $614 million to Lucille Packard over the years, making the Bay Area foundation the single largest philanthropic supporter of Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford and one of the biggest funders of children's hospitals in the nation.