Press EXCERPTS

Boston Globe, 6/29/16
Opponents of the plan by Boston Children’s Hospital to expand its campus by building over a beloved healing garden will be able to continue their lawsuit against the hospital. 

New York Times, 6/21/16
But while the garden has a powerful emotional tug, the group has also raised a practical question: Will a bigger, higher-tech hospital thwart state and national efforts to get spiraling medical costs under control?

CommonWealth magazine, 6/9/16
The Boston Children’s Hospital project as currently proposed fails to meet the test of the Triple Aim and, if it goes forward, will propel backward the delivery system in Massachusetts and miss an important opportunity to move decisively in the direction of high-quality, cost-effective care.

Becker's Hospital Review, 6/9/16
In 2012, international patients represented 4 percent of the hospital's net patient revenue. This percentage jumped to 7.3 percent in 2015. In addition, international patients contributed $122 million to the facility's patient revenue in FY 2015, a $67.7 million gain from 2012.

HealthLeaders, 5/18/16
Gardens have been a mainstay at hospitals, even before research backed up widely held views that being in nature had a calming and healing effect on patients.

Boston Globe, 5/3/16
But if you listened carefully, beneath it all, you could hear something more profound going on. There is a battle raging between the head and the heart of Boston Children’s Hospital.

Boston Globe, 4/12/16
If eliminating a garden raises value questions for Children’s — as critics contend — so, too, does the issue of reducing the number of poor patients.

WGBH, 3/29/16
The hospital is now trying to bulldoze this story by refusing to comment, claiming they have all the approvals they need. That is Arrogance with a capital A.

WBUR, 3/25/16
Cutting down our redwood and destroying our garden, thinking that we can build something better than nature, betrays our commitment to preserving life. Once Prouty Garden is gone, it is lost forever, taking with it the memories and meaning of many lives lost and many more saved at Boston Children’s Hospital — and denying its healing to future patients.

WGBH, 3/3/16
“Prouty garden matters because it’s one of the important healing spaces at Children’s,” said Rich. “It is not seen as that necessarily on a balance sheet, but it is for many patients and their families…  we need to see it as an integral part of what we can offer."

WBZ-TV, 2/25/16
Critics of the plan say the garden has been a therapeutic sanctuary for sick kids at Children’s for decades. Elizabeth Richter, who testified at the hearing Thursday, remembers taking her brother David Horton there when he was suffering from a brain tumor. His ashes were also spread in the garden when he died at age 12 in 1973.

Boston Globe, 2/23/16
How can state officials calculate the worth of the land consecrated with the ashes of David Horton? How can Boston Children’s Hospital assess the cost of abandoning its promise — made 60 years ago — that the Prouty Garden would be a refuge for its little patients for as long as the hospital was working to heal them?

Boston Globe, 2/13/16
Large hospital construction projects must be approved by the state, but this is only the second time regulators have asked for this sort of cost analysis before making a decision.

Boston Herald, 1/13/16
A controversial expansion plan for Boston Children’s Hospital to clear out the facility’s beloved Prouty Garden and make way for new medical space is on hold after the state ordered an independent cost analysis of the project.

Boston Globe, 1/13/16
State regulators are asking Boston Children’s Hospital to show that its planned $1 billion campus expansion won’t undercut their efforts to restrain growth in health care costs.

Boston Globe, 1/22/16
My son can no longer speak for himself, nor can the countless other children who, through no fault of the hospital, died within its walls. So I now speak for them. The hospital administrators who want to demolish the breathtakingly beautiful Prouty Garden ignore the fact that, for many, it is the heart and soul of the place.

Boston Globe, 1/8/16
And speaking of mistakes, Brazelton makes it clear that he believes Children’s will be making a monumental one — one it will come to regret — if it plows under the Prouty Garden to make room for its new clinical building.

Boston Globe, 12/23/15
The value of the Prouty Garden is felt mostly by sick children and their parents — not a very powerful group. 

Boston Globe, 12/23/15
MY DAUGHTER Cammie, a toddler then, spent three days a week with me at Children’s Hospital 35 years ago, while her older sister Elsa received intensive speech therapy for autism disorders. Cammie’s gone from me now, but I was hoping her family of stone friends would always be safe.

Boston Globe, 12/18/15
At this point, it would take a miracle to save the garden. But men and women who perform miracles at Children’s every day, among them doctors who have watched their patients take their last breath in that verdant space, are not giving up.

WBUR, 11/17/15
The doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners who signed the petition say they’ve been left out of the hospital’s decision to construct an 11-story clinical building on the site of the garden and build other smaller, green spaces throughout the property.

WBUR, 9/24/15
"It really boils down to what you’re in the business of doing."

WBUR, 8/17/15
The group Friends of Prouty Garden filed a letter and large packet of documents with the attorney general’s office, asking that the division that deals with nonprofit organizations and charities take up the case.

WBUR, 4/30/15
For kids otherwise confined day and night to a tiny, cordoned off piece of hospital property these fifteen to thirty minute trips were their only connection to the greater world, the ‘world outside’, as one horrifically abused seven year old boy once described it to me.

Boston Globe, 2/3/15
That 23,000-square-foot garden has been a place of spiritual healing for patients and their families and for workers at Children’s Hospital. Such was certainly the intention of Olive Higgins Prouty. Let us hope that it is not too late for other plans to be developed in order to keep this beautiful and healing space.

Boston Globe, 1/31/15
“Despite the motto of Children’s Hospital — ‘Until every child is well’ — there are children who do not get better,’’ he said. “Would you want their last view of the world to be looking at four walls, or the sun rising through the branches of an ancient redwood tree?’’

Boston Globe, 1/12/15
Yet another couple had come from Europe to pursue lifesaving treatment for their ailing child. But cure proved elusive, and when medical options were exhausted, the heartbroken parents had one final wish. When life support had to be withdrawn, they wanted it done at sunrise — in the garden.

Boston Globe, 8/1/13
No matter what happens, Nicole Altieri says the garden will remain an inextricable part of her son’s childhood. Diagnosed with heart problems shortly after his birth, he spent some of his first few weeks at the hospital, returning at 13 months for a heart transplant. The Prouty Garden was the first place he ever touched grass.

“He couldn’t speak, but he would sign, ‘I want to go outside, I want to go outside,’ all the time,” she said.

WBUR, 7/25/13
“To come out here and be able to sit in nature with the tree, climb all around the roots of that tree, sit by the fountain, we’d have picnics under this tree,” Grogan recalls. “This was our one place to come and feel slightly normal for her. And to be able to come out and just be a part of nature again, for her, was so healing and so critical.”