Columbus Hospital Receives $50 Million from Nationwide, Will Change Name

Nationwide’s charitable foundation will give $50 million over 10 years to Columbus Children’s Hospital, which agreed to rename itself after the insurance and financial services company, the hospital said this week.

The money will go toward construction of a new main hospital building and help recruit doctors who work in the hospital’s heart center, neonatal intensive care and child injury prevention programs, the hospital said.

Hospital officials contacted Columbus-based Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. last year about taking a lead role in a $740 expansion project, said Abigail Wexner, chairwoman of the hospital’s board of trustees.

The name change, which will take effect in early 2007, was the hospital’s idea, she said.

Calling itself Nationwide Children’s Hospital will boost name recognition and the hospital’s reputation, Wexner said.

The hospital is the fifth-largest freestanding children’s hospital in the country, based on number of patient beds, according to industry statistics.

Corporations are increasingly interested in lending their names to children’s hospitals, said Lawrence McAndrews, president of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions in Alexandria, Va.

Children’s hospitals have become such vital, positive organizations in their communities, and corporations want to be involved with that, McAndrews said.

Toy company Mattel Inc. pledged $25 million in 1998 to support what is now known as Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA in Los Angeles. Drug-maker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. donated $5 million to a New Jersey hospital now named for that company, as did the brokerage firm identified with Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York.