Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Childrens Frisco facility will be about 345,000 square feet.[/caption]
Lyndon Olson took the stage during Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children’s groundbreaking ceremony Oct. 19 with a slight but virtually unnoticeable limp.
Olson, Scottish Rite’s board of trustees chairman and a former patient at the hospital, had both of his legs amputated when he was 11 years old. Olson spoke fondly of his doctor, who taught him how to walk again with his prosthetics.
Scottish Rite officials and patients celebrate the hospital’s groundbreaking Oct. 19.[/caption]
“[My doctor] was one of the grandest human beings that God ever put on this earth,” Olson said. “As far as I’m concerned, in everywhere I go and everything I see, his spirit is in that hospital, and his spirit will be in this hospital.”
Nearly 100 years after Scottish Rite established its Dallas campus, the hospital broke ground on its first ever branch facility in Frisco.
The 345,000-square-foot facility, which is expected to open in fall 2018, will offer ambulatory care, day surgeries, pediatric sports medicine and research, as well as orthopedic care.
The Frisco branch facility was announced in 2014. Since then, the planned size of the facility has tripled from the original estimate of 100,000 square feet. Some of that space will be shelled in to prepare for adding more services, said Mark Bateman, Scottish Rite’s senior vice president of public relations.
“We want to make sure we’re not only prepared to very effectively meet the needs today but also to meet the needs in the future,” he said.
The Frisco campus will be anchored by the Center for Excellence in Sports Medicine. The center will include a fracture clinic where parents can bring in children with a fracture to be treated without a referral or appointment.
Scottish Rite owns 40 acres of land at the northeast corner of Lebanon Road and Dallas Parkway. The branch facility will take up about 10 acres of that land. The rest of the land is being planned for green space with walking trails and some practice fields to be used by patients and the community.
Bateman said the look and feel of the Frisco campus will be very similar to the main campus in Dallas. A colorful motif will brighten the hallways, and the smell of buttery popcorn will fill the air upon entering the facility.
“We intend for the patient experience but also the experience that anyone would have—guests or even staff for that matter—is very similar,” he said. “We want it to look and feel and smell the same. We want it to be almost a replica of the culture we have at the main campus.”
