Mercy Medical Center – Des Moines is renovating the Children’s Center at Mercy into a state-of-the-art facility equipped to serve more patients.

Workers recently finished installing brightly colored accent windows on the hospital’s third floor. Mercy chose kid-friendly colors “so people would notice that we’re serving kids here,” said Jan Myers, the center’s director. Though Mercy has always served children and has operated a pediatric unit since 1925, it’s striving to become as visible as its competitor, Iowa Health Des Moines’ Blank Children’s Hospital.

The $12 million renovation, which is being funded entirely from donations through the Mercy Foundation, includes an all-new 22-bed general pediatric unit, an eight-bed pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and a 10-bed flex unit that will accommodate either intensive care or general patients. The project also includes new support offices for pediatricians and staff, and a Ronald McDonald Family Room, which Mercy officials say is the first such facility in the state.

Empty space created on the third floor when Mercy constructed the East Tower addition five years ago has enabled the hospital to conduct the expansion in phases. The first phase, scheduled to be complete by late October, is the new pediatric unit, with rooms approximately twice as large as before. Each room will have 14-foot-wide windows, a big improvement from the original windows, which were only about two feet across.

“That’s really important for the kids to be able to see outside, and natural sunlight helps a lot with healing,” Myers said. The rooms will also be large enough to accommodate two to three family members for overnight stays, with a full-size couch, a recliner, a small refrigerator and even an iPod docking station.

In addition to a full bathroom, each room will be equipped with an additional sink to encourage hand washing, as well as a medication preparation station and a computer monitor for updating electronic medical records.

Work on the second phase, the new PICU, begins as soon as the current general pediatric unit moves from its current space on the third floor into the renovated space on Nov. 7. The third phase, building the flex rooms, is expected to be complete by June 30, 2012.

The Ronald McDonald Family Room, which will open in early November, will have three bedrooms, a kitchen, a lounge, and laundry and shower facilities.

It will “have all of the services that the Ronald McDonald House has, just on a scaled-down version,” Myers said.