NC Children’s Hospital secures $100 million grant, will break ground in 2027
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
The Duke Endowment is granting $100 million to the developing North Carolina Children’s Hospital, The News & Observer exclusively learned, which will allow North Carolina families to access specialized pediatric care closer to home.
Read more Traffic concerns prompt Lake Norman area board to delay vote on dozens of townhomes
North Carolina Children’s is a collaborative effort between UNC Health and Duke Health to create a stand-alone children’s hospital in North Carolina. Construction on a new campus in Apex is set to begin in 2027.
The grant is the largest philanthropic commitment to date for NC Children’s and joins a $424.5 million investment from the North Carolina General Assembly. The philanthropic gift is among the 10 largest in North Carolina history, according to Precision Strategies, a public relations firm involved in the development.
NC Children’s will be the first independent children’s health system in the Carolinas. There is pediatric care at various hospital systems in the states, but this project will close many gaps in the pediatric healthcare ecosystem, according to Chair of the Duke Endowment Board of Trustees Charles Lucas III.
“We have many children’s hospitals across the two states that do amazing work, and most of which are beneficiaries of the Duke Endowment,” Lucas said. “But this freestanding children’s hospital, that is a collaboration of two of the major academic medical centers, is going to create something that’s really quite special.”
As is, North Carolina is the largest state without a freestanding children’s hospital, according to North Carolina Children’s COO Ian Buchanan.
Information on other philanthropic grants and donations will come in late 2026 or 2027, North Carolina Children’s Foundation President Morgan Abbott said.
NC Children’s plans to open in the early 2030s. Apex was chosen because it is within three hours of 75% of North Carolina families, many of whom otherwise go to Washington D.C. or Atlanta for specialized care, including in cancer and genetic diseases.
The Apex campus is a part of large development called Veridea. The development will be anchored by the hospital and a community college, The News & Observer previously reported.
The pediatric programs of both UNC and Duke will move to the new hospital upon opening. When medical students and nursing students do pediatric rotations, they will be at NC Children’s.
North Carolinian pediatric patients often need to travel to specific children’s hospitals outside the state. The state has the highest number of children flown out to other hospitals for medical care, according to Thomas Owens, Chief Operating Officer of Duke University Health System and NC Children’s Administrator.
“We’ve had children leaving our state for years,” Owens said. “I think what’s most exciting about this is allowing North Carolina Children’s, through its partnership with UNC Health and Duke Health, to really build out services that children and families in North Carolina need and deserve, which includes specialized care at our campus in Apex and in the Triangle, but also a network to support care in local communities around the state.”
NC Children’s plans to work with pediatricians and family physicians in communities to provide academic resources and support. One in five North Carolina counties have no pediatricians, meaning care is done by nurse practitioners and family medicine.
One goal of NC Children’s is to eliminate some of the need for families to travel long distances for access to clinical trials and medical specialties.
Read more ‘Chatty Hatty,’ North Carolina’s first Black woman radio broadcaster, dies at 98
The planned campus in Apex would offer approximately 500 beds for acute care, along with a 70-bed pediatric behavioral health hospital. Other planned elements include an ambulatory surgery center and research and education facilities.
Pediatric behavioral health issues have continued to climb rapidly following the COVID-19 pandemic, Owens said.
“There’s been a national, really epidemic of behavioral health conditions affecting children and adolescents, and I say children specifically because pediatric depression and anxiety have increased substantially,” Owens said. “That’s an area where, again, North Carolina lags behind most of our peer states, in terms of access to those services.”
There will be 70 dedicated behavioral health beds, and 36 of 500 acute care beds will be for patients with both a behavioral health condition and one or more other conditions complicating care.
Unlike children’s wings at general hospitals, a children’s hospital is designed for younger patients at every step, Chair of the NC Children’s Board of Directors Wesley Burks said. The spaces are more colorful, engaging and child and family-oriented.
“(Pediatric patients) don’t have to go to different places to get physical therapy, to get their school done that day. It’s all there. So all the services, the wraparound services that take care of a child, are going to be on site and seeing them at the same time,” Burks said.
Developing a space explicitly for children is also good for the health and retention of providers, Burks said.
“Forty years ago, the people that took care of kids, the pediatricians, the surgeons that operated on children, had a dream,” Burks said. “We would talk about, people at UNC and Duke, how cool it would be to come together to create really a world-class place that we could see children, that we could train new pediatricians and other surgeons and do research together.”
The project is expected to create around 4,000 construction jobs for the duration of the project. Once open, hospital officials estimate an additional 8,500 healthcare worker jobs and more than 9,000 indirect jobs, including service workers and hotel staff.
NC Department of Commerce models predict the hospital will be one of the largest economic development projects in the state history, according to NC Children’s, as the hospital campus is expected to create nearly $27 billion in state economic output and $1.1 billion in taxes over 20 years.
This story has been updated.
Questions about life in North Carolina? Or have a tip or story idea you’d like to share? The service journalism teams at The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer want to hear from you.
You can submit your question by filling out this form.
This story was originally published October 20, 2026 at 10:00 AM with the headline “NC Children’s Hospital secures $100 million grant, will break ground in 2027.”
Read more Deputy fired for misusing county’s license plate reader system, NC sheriff says
