One year after the groundbreaking ceremony for the new 12-story, $1.6 billion Lyndon B. Johnson hospital expansion, Harris Health officials said construction on the project is on track for completion by fall 2028, which will double the hospital’s existing size from 200 to 450 hospital beds.
Patrick Casey, Harris Health’s senior vice president of facilities and construction, said the crews are currently constructing the concrete structure of the hospital.
“Harris Health will take four to six months to actually activate the building," Casey said. "What I mean by activate is move in medical equipment, all the IT technology, furniture and conduct staff training. We’ve completed all the foundation work below the hospital.”
The project
One of the major completed projects, Casey said, is the hospital’s flood mitigation system, a $20 million dollar expense which consists of six underground water tanks capable of holding up to 8 million gallons of rainwater to reduce chances of flooding.
Casey said the foundation of the hospital was raised up 5 feet in order to build the water tanks. By storing the water, hospital officials said the stormwater detention system could gradually release stormwater into the city and county storm sewers as the weather clears.
Other features the incoming Level 1-capable trauma hospital will have include:
- A community garden
- A new, bigger LBJ urban farm to provide food for farmer’s markets and food “farmacies," which are the hospital system’s partnership with patients that offers nutrition education, and 30 pounds of free food supplies over a six to eight month period
- A helipad
- A comprehensive stroke center
- A central energy plant with carbon-emissions reduction that will use both diesel and natural gas for fuel
- Full generator backup system
When it comes to the possibility of running into supply chain issues or costs impacted by tariffs, Casey said they have been operating far ahead, but still have concerns.
“Thankfully, we got ahead of a lot of it,” he said. “But we still have one more final bid package where we call for the interiors. Everybody’s concerned about it, in terms of potential tariffs, the labor demand, materials [and] issues with the amount of mega projects in the region ... it’s unavoidable.”
The takeaway
In the estimated time leading up to when the hospital is expected to start receiving new patients in 2029, Casey said there will be a need for additional construction workers.
“We have 600 or so people working on the project on-site. We will ramp up to 3,000-5,000 folks just for construction,” he said.
As far as filling in the need for health care workers inside the hospital, Glorimar Medina, Harris Health’s CEO of Hospital Campuses, said even though it’s challenging to staff health care positions at the moment, she said they feel confident they will be able to fill the roles.
“We’re very excited because ... we feel that we'll be able to staff it, not only with our current staff, but also we're building pipelines. It's very important to us that we're not all offering services to the community in terms of health care, but we're also enhancing the community,” Medina said.
Zooming out
Harris County voters overwhelmingly approved of funding the Harris Health system’s $2.5 billion bond in November 2023. Harris Health officials are preparing for the next step in the multiphase, multiyear project.
Medina said once the hospital and its staff are ready for patient admissions in 2029, the new LBJ hospital will begin offering services that she said the area never had before, including services for heart attacks at the stroke comprehensive center.
"It is very important that patients won't have to be transferred anymore when they're having heart attacks, when they're having problems with a stroke, we won't have to transfer them to the [Texas] Medical Center, losing precious minutes of care that they could have had," she said. "So in the future, this center will have capabilities for heart attacks, for strokes and for the highest levels of trauma."
