Children’s Medical Center Plano is opening the doors to a new tower doubling the size of the North Texas hospital.
The 395,000-square-foot, eight-story tower officially opens Dec. 10 and has been in the works for five years.
Vanessa Walls, chief market executive at Children’s Health, hopes the expansion will address growing demand from Collin County’s expanding population.
“The community north of Dallas [is] growing exponentially,” Walls said. “For D-FW as a whole, we expect the pediatric population to double by the year 2050, and being able to have the resources to support that growth was really important.”
The expansion adds 140 new inpatient beds, nearly tripling the hospital’s bed space, according to a news release. It brings the total bed count to 212, Walls said.
The tower also adds 48 emergency department rooms, nearly double the hospital’s previous capacity. Walls said the expansion hopefully will shorten wait times for emergency visits.
The expansion includes four unequipped operation rooms available for future growth. The center has eight operation rooms in use.
One of the shelled rooms was built larger to support trauma care as the hospital seeks to grow its trauma designation from a Level IV to a Level II, Walls said. The hospital hopes to achieve Level III trauma designation by the end of the year, which would make it more equipped to care for traumatic injuries.
The tower expansion includes new imaging capabilities with upgraded scanners, MRI and more X-ray and ultrasound capacity. It also has a helicopter pad on its roof.
The hospital, which opened in 2008, will expand on six specialty care programs: cancer and blood disorders, surgical services, gastroenterology, its heart center, neurology and pulmonology.
“That tower then allows us to have enough room for those key programs … that they’ve been challenged with over the last couple of years because we’ve been so full,” Walls said. “They can now really hit the ground running to bring those programs in a much more robust fashion to the community.”
Walls said the hospital is fortunate to be in a comfortable staffing position, having hired more than 400 people since the beginning of the year. As their volume grows, Walls said, they will continue to hire.
In recent years, Children’s Health has opened a campus in Prosper, purchased more space in Plano and most recently started construction on a $5 billion facility in Dallas.
The Plano expansion compliments the new pediatric campus planned in Dallas, which won’t be complete for several years.
“What benefits Dallas benefits Plano and vice versa,” Walls said.
Walls said the new tower incorporates updated technology and feedback from “visioning sessions” with employees, community members and the hospital’s board.
Each floor of the tower, Walls said, is represented by a Texas ecosystem and has an animal ambassador. For example, the first floor’s theme is the grasslands, and the ambassador is a horse. The hospital has pastured horses on its campus.
Many hospitals are in urban areas and may not have the amenities the 180-acre Plano campus has, like outdoor spaces, a creek and terraces on some units that add to the center’s “healing environment,” Walls said. The tower also has a family lounge on each floor.
“It’s just a beautiful, bright, whimsical but not childish environment that I think is beneficial for both patients and families,” Walls said.
The hospital received a $5 million gift from Rudolph and Christina Andrea of the Andrea-Mennen Family Foundation to support the project. The hospital’s atrium will be named the Andrea-Mennen Family Foundation Atrium.
The expansion will be complete by the end of the year, Walls said, and they will begin phasing into the new tower over the next several weeks. Most patients come through the emergency department and will be admitted to the new tower as the floors are ready.
“This team is so ready and so excited to be able to get into space where they can really stretch out a little bit and do what they do best, which is take care of our patients and families,” Walls said.
