The community will have a chance to tour the new Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital and Eskenazi Health campus for the first time at a special Public Dedication and Ribbon-Cutting on Nov. 16 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event comes just three week before the historic move from Wishard Memorial Hospital to the Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital and Eskenazi Health campus.

The day will start with the third annual Eskenazi Health Stride 5k and 1-mile races that are aimed to support community health through preventive care, healthful diet and lifestyle choices. Interested participants can visit eskenazihealthfoundation.org to learn more, view course maps and find a link to register for the competitions. 

Eskenazi Health Stride will start with registration at 6:45 a.m. with the races starting at 8 a.m. The event will begin at the historic façade of the Ott Building at Wishard and finish with an idyllic view of the nearly complete Eskenazi Health campus, entering from Michigan St. along Eskenazi Ave. The event will also feature a new downtown course, commemorative medals for the first 1,000 finishers and a post-event tour of the new facility immediately before the public dedication ceremony.

Four years after voters overwhelmingly approved the construction of a new Wishard hospital campus in Indianapolis, the new Eskenazi Health campus is set to open and will include a 315-bed inpatient hospital, more than 200 exam rooms, a 90-bed treatment room emergency department with a 16-bed clinical decision unit, a 110-exam-room multispecialty outpatient care center, a women’s health center, a 2,700-car parking garage, a central energy plant, and offices for faculty, research and administration functions.

To celebrate the opening, a series of community activities are planned for November to introduce the new hospital campus to patients, families, friends, builders, partners, philanthropic supporters and the entire community. The move from Wishard Memorial Hospital to the Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital and Eskenazi Health campus will occur Dec. 7, 2013. The new hospital campus is located just west of the current hospital on the IUPUI campus in downtown Indianapolis. 

In June 2011, Sidney and Lois Eskenazi contributed one of the greatest philanthropic gifts ever to a Central Indiana institution and one of the largest gifts ever made to a public hospital in the United States. The Eskenazis contributed $40 million for the new Wishard hospital facilities.

For more than 150 years, Wishard-Eskenazi Health has provided high-quality, cost-effective, patient-centered health care to the residents of Marion County. Wishard-Eskenazi Health is one of America’s five largest safety net health care systems, with nearly 1 million outpatient visits annually.

For more information about the new Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital and Eskenazi Health campus, please visit www.EskenaziHealth.org. For more information on Eskenazi Health Stride, please visit www.EskenaziHealthStride.com.

CONTACT: Todd Harper
Phone: 317.880.4785
Pager: 317.310.5972
E-mail: todd.harper@eskenazihealth.edu