In July, Nikki Roux, vice president of operations for Memorial Hermann Northeast Hospital, said hospital officials will begin renovating 25,000 square feet of unused space located in the hospital's West Tower, which opened in 2018. At the time, Roux said hospital officials were already anticipating future growth.
“The community is growing; this is a very high-growth area,” Roux said. “So when we built [the West Tower], we took that in mind, just making sure we had space to expand into.”
In addition to overall population growth, Roux noted the area's growing senior population—which typically means more hospital admissions—as another reason for the expansion.
“Before the pandemic ... the number of inpatients that we have admitted to the hospital on a daily basis was much lower than it is right now,” Roux said. “After the pandemic, we just stayed high; we never went down, and it's not because we have a lot of COVID[-19] patients because we have very few, if any, of those on a day-to-day basis. It's more that while we were in the middle of the pandemic, the community grew up around us, and our population is aging as well.”
Set to be completed by February, the $18.5 million project will result in the addition of 30 private inpatient rooms, bringing the hospital's total bed count to 257.
“Today, we're very full so when we don't have a vacant bed to put a patient ... they have to wait in a bed in the emergency room,” Roux said. “[This expansion] means that patients won't have to wait so long for beds [because] we'll have some readily available, and there will be less time between the time of admission when you come through the ER and the time that you actually get to a bed.”
The 25,000-square-foot space will also feature a therapy gym where patients can go to complete physical and occupational therapy. Roux noted the gym will be a first for the Humble campus.
“[The therapy gym] will give us an opportunity to bring patients ... to a location where they can take advantage of therapy adjunct devices that we would normally have to bring to their room, so this allows us more flexibility,” Roux said.
Further enhancing the campus, Roux said the hospital received approval in May for a full lab renovation. While an exact timeline had not been identified for the $3.8 million project as of press time, Roux said construction is expected to take anywhere from six to 12 months.
“Our lab is still in the same footprint as it was when the original hospital was built in 1977, and so, as we've gotten busier and added beds and buildings, we've kept the same [lab] footprint, and we've just added more equipment,” Roux said. “So we're going to expand it by 40%, and it'll be all state-of-the-art and [have] lots more usable space.”
