Topping Off Ceremony - Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital

http://pennstatehershey.org/childrens Faculty, staff, donors, and patients and their families helped us mark a milestone in the construction of the new home of Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital when they joined us February 8 for the building's "topping off"—placement of the final steel beam.

Dr. Harold L. Paz, Medical Center CEO, remarked on the importance of the Children's Hospital to the central Pennsylvania region and the excitement of this milestone in the construction of the new 252,000-square-foot, five-story facility before construction workers and a crane hoisted the final beam into place. A 'topping off' ceremony is a long-standing tradition of construction workers, particularly steel workers, to commemorate the completion of a building's structure -- specifically the placement of the final steel beam. In keeping with the tradition, the beam placed atop Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital today was adorned with a small evergreen tree on one end and an American flag on the other.
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Thank you for joining me today to celebrate the topping off ceremony of the brand new Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital building. Very soon, we'll be able to watch as it is lifted into place, and with that complete the structural steel work for the new building. This will mark an important milestone in the construction of our new Children's Hospital, which will open its doors in the fall of 2012.

The new Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital will be an important resource for families in our community. We already offer state-of-the-art care to our pediatric patients, and soon we will have a state-of-the-art facility to match.




The new facility is designed around the idea of family-centered care, enabling families to be together in a private, comforting environment. I'm particularly proud of the ways in which the new building will integrate opportunities for play and for learning throughout, so that even the sickest children will have a chance to simply be kids. Today's topping off ceremony brings us that much closer to making that vision a reality.

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Science & Technology

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• penn state
• penn state hershey
• hershey medical center
• topping off ceremony
• childrens hospital