University Health’s nearly $837 million expansion is well underway, with a new Women’s and Children’s Hospital due to open in late summer 2023.
At 12 stories high, there will be room for 300 patient beds, spacious operating rooms and family waiting areas that offer visitors expansive views of the South Texas Medical Center.
The campus will have a new emergency entrance for expecting families and a stunning front lobby staircase with a donor wall and art installation that represents a mama bird with her nest, said Leni Kirkman, chief marketing communications and corporate affairs officer.
Once open, officials said, the hospital will be the only one in South Texas focused exclusively on the needs of women and children, providing a home for the region’s first Level IV maternity center and Level IV neonatal intensive care unit, as well as a milk bank, child life center and congenital heart center.
Hospital staff and University Health Foundation donors toured the construction site Tuesday afternoon, marveling at the progress made since June 2019 by Joeris General Contractors and JE Dunn Construction, which are working jointly on this project.
Brian Freeman, the system’s executive director of capital improvements, said they were fortunate to have avoided lot of construction challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The biggest challenge was trying to get materials here, but we’ve been really blessed because we placed many of those orders in early ahead of COVID,” he said.
Still, having more than 500 workers on-site every day during the pandemic could be complicated.
“We had to make sure when we were inside the building doing renovations everyone had on their masks, and when cases were rampant, we had to check temperatures and ask everyone how they were feeling,” Freeman said. “I won’t say it slowed us down, but it costs money to have a monitor at the gate.”
One way of speeding the project was using prefabricated bathrooms and headwalls, which were assembled by workers in New Braunfels and shipped to the site ready to install.
The new hospital was originally estimated to cost $390 million, but it would have had only six floors. The system’s board of managers authorized staff to spend $594 million on the women’s and children’s hospital from a total of $836.9 for the entire project.
The new 628,000-square-foot tower adjoins University Hospital’s 10-floor Sky Tower, which opened in 2014 and was part of the largest construction project in the county’s history at a cost of $899.4 million.
The architectural design from Marmon Mok plans for 30 intensive care unit rooms, 68 neonatal intensive care unit rooms, 30 acute care rooms, 60 rooms for OB-GYN services and 30 antepartum rooms.
The major expansion also includes a 900-space parking garage, an advanced diagnostic center, shell space for future growth and a podium expansion that will be used for a new kitchen, servery, dining room and conference rooms.
The Bexar County Hospital District did not raise its property tax rate to fund this expansion. Money for the new women’s and children’s hospital comes from cash reserves and certificates of obligations, which is debt issued by local governments to finance projects without voter approval.
Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said the new hospital has been a long time coming.
Ten years ago, University Health President and CEO George Hernandez ended a 14-month agreement with Christus Santa Rosa Health System to build a new children’s hospital together.
Wolff, who had pushed for the collaboration, said at the time that he was disappointed.
The idea for a jointly run, free-standing children’s hospital goes back to at least the early 1990s, when nonprofit hospital operator Christus was in talks with Methodist Hospital. Over the years, other San Antonio institutions tried unsuccessfully to build a free-standing pediatric hospital.
University of Texas Health Science Center proposed building a children’s hospital with for-profit operator Baptist Health System, but that deal eventually fell through in 2013 when ownership of the Baptist system was sold by Vanguard Health Systems to Tenet Healthcare Corp.
That same year, Christus closed adult services at its downtown hospital, making way for renovations and the opening of the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio.
Now, as the county judge serves his last term in office before retirement, he can’t help but feel like everything worked out best for the taxpayer-funded hospital system.
“The more we thought about it, we decided to build a women’s and children’s hospital,” Wolff said. “I think this made a lot more sense than some free-standing hospital off by itself.”
Wolff credits Hernandez, who came on board as CEO in 2005, for turning around the county-owned system.
Three years ago, health care consulting firm Blue Cottage conducted a market analysis for the Bexar County Hospital District and found that the system needs to acquire property in different areas to keep up with population growth.
In September, University Health announced plans to spend $10.4 million on 68 acres of land to build a hospital on the county’s southwest side near Texas A&M University-San Antonio.
There are at least two other sites in mind for future hospitals: an 80-acre tract on the Northwest Side on Loop 1604 and Shaenfield Road and a 42.5-acre tract on the Northeast Side on Retama Parkway and Lookout Road.
