Cook Children’s to build new medical tower in Fort Worth as part of 10-year expansion plan
Cook Children’s Health Network is building a 700,000-square foot medical tower on its Fort Worth campus, the health network announced Wednesday.
The tower will be built on a plot of land near the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Cooper Street. The building will add another 37 beds to Cook Children’s neonatal intensive care unit, where the hospital cares for newborns in need of serious care. The new tower will also allow Cook Children’s to expand its pediatric intensive care unit and to treat more children in the hematology and oncology departments, as well as provide additional space for research, according to the health network.
“We have capacity issues in these areas we’re expanding,” Stan Davis, the president of Cook Children’s Medical Center, said in a statement. “We, unfortunately, from time to time have had to divert kids to other places as far away as San Antonio, Oklahoma and Louisiana.”
The additional beds in the new medical tower will allow Cook Children’s to keep more kids in Fort Worth for treatment, the health network said.
The hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit will get some much needed breathing room in the new tower. The PICU, as it is known, is one of the busiest places on the Cook Children’s campus, and is more vulnerable to the waxes and wanes of respiratory illnesses.
In past years, when sick kids have overwhelmed Cook Children’s as cases of flu, respiratory syncytial virus, and other diseases have peaked, they’ve been treated at the PICU. During peak respiratory illness seasons, Cook Children’s emergency room can treat between 500 and 600 patients a day in its emergency room, and many of those children go on to be admitted to the PICU.
“If we don’t have adequate beds in the PICU, kids end up waiting or being held in the (emergency room), which is not the ideal environment for them,” Davis said in the statement.
At Cook Children’s existing PICU, kids getting treatment are separated by a curtain, which the health network said can sometimes be stressful for families who have to hear or see another family’s medical care. The new PICU will have 56 private rooms.
Construction is expected to start at the end of 2025, a spokesperson for the health network said in an email. The spokesperson declined to say how much the total cost of the project will be.
Cook Children’s is the dominant provider of medical care for children in Tarrant County; more than 80% of kids who receive inpatient treatment are treated at Cook Children’s, according to the health network’s 2024 bond rating from S&P Global Ratings. The health network has “exceptional” unrestricted reserves of more than $5 billion, according to S&P’s rating.
In September, the health network asked Fort Worth City Council to rezone the lots where it plans to build the new medical tower Council members approved Cook Children’s rezoning request over the opposition of some of Cook Children’s neighbors, who wanted more information about the health network’s plans before the request was approved, the Fort Worth Report reported.
This story was originally published November 13, 2024 at 11:06 AM.
