Image Courtesy of Cook Children’s
In January, Cook Children’s reportedly hit its highest patient volume ever for its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with over 100 babies admitted all at once.
This scenario (most likely due to the unprecedented growth of the city and surrounding areas over the past few years) has created a challenge for this section of Cook Children’s NICU, which was one of largest in the country when it opened in 2011. With 99 private rooms, 106 beds, and roughly 450 employees, Cook Children’s NICU unit is the size of a small hospital itself.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Fort Worth’s population was 978,468 as of July 2023. With an estimated 59 people moving here every day, the city expects Fort Worth to hit the one million mark this year. Fort Worth is also the fastest growing city out of the top 30 most populated cities in the nation, according to a release.
As many may imagine, this influx of residents has only added to the number of cases the Cook Children’s NICU department is hit with on a daily basis. In fact, the NICU neared capacity earlier this year.
But the NICU is only one of the departments experiencing this overload.
During busy sick seasons, Cook Children’s will have influxes of flu, RSV, and COVID-19 cases, which overwhelms the emergency departments and urgent care centers. It’s not uncommon for healthcare workers to see 500 to 600+ patients in a single day. The result – longer wait times for patients and more strain for the health care system.
"The needs of our community are growing, and so are we,” said Rick W. Merrill, president and CEO of Cook Children’s Health Care System. “We’re committed to being there for every child, which is why we're exploring opportunities to further expand our campus to better serve the children and families across Fort Worth and the other counties we serve.”
Although no formal plans have been made, Cook Children’s is currently reviewing options for an expansion of its Fort Worth campus. As it stands, Cook Children’s is looking into re-zoning nearly six acres of land near Pennsylvania Avenue and Eighth Street Avenue. But that’s not all. Construction efforts are also in the works for the medical center’s existing campus.
“We’re looking at what we may be able to move from our current campus to the other side of 8th Ave.,” said Spencer Seals, vice president of construction and real estate at Cook Children’s. “The goal is to make more room on our current campus for critical care services, which we direly need. While we don’t know exactly what that looks like right now, we’re evaluating our options to see what best serves the community, just as we have for the past 106 years.”
