Four hospitals in the west Houston and Katy areas are expanding their campuses in an effort to make a trip to the hospital a little more accessible. “Our hospital is frequently full, and the population in Katy continues to grow. I’m excited for our hospital to offer our same type [of] quality, to expand our services, be able to keep more patients and expand our capacities to population growth,” said John Kueven, chief operating officer of Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital.
Memorial Hermann
Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital will open a new patient tower the first week of January with additional projects opening from spring until the fall of 2016. The new tower will expand nearly all of the Katy hospital’s services on the first four floors, Kueven said. “Katy is still the fastest-growing area in Houston,” Kueven said. “We’re projecting more than a 13 percent growth rate over the next five years in Katy, and we often are at capacity. Our ER is full and our hospital is full, so really in January [that] gives us a lot more capability to grow with our community over the next five years.” [polldaddy poll=9199132] Looking ahead, he said hospital officials are exploring expansion in the new tower on floors five and six in the next five years. Plans for the fifth floor could include a general medicine and surgical floor, he said. “Katy has grown so much and the hospital has grown, and a lot of people still have the mentality of needing to go down to the [Texas] Medical Center, but we can provide it at Memorial Hermann Katy,” he said.Texas Children’s West
Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus is also planning for growth. “We have a $50 million expansion underway right now, and it’s a three-year expansion,” Texas Children’s West Campus President Chanda Cashen Chacón said. “We’ve just started the second year of that and really the goal is to build out almost all of our remaining shell space that we have on the campus right now. That’s really not because we want to build—it’s because the community needs us to build.” The hospital is expanding its medical office building space to include ambulatory care and adding space in its inpatient building for beds along with expanding operating rooms and interventional radiology, she said. In October and November, the hospital opened 18 acute care beds. Eight of those beds are in a special isolation unit, which is exclusive to the West campus, Cashen Chacón said. By the end of the expansion, the hospital will be an 86-bed facility. In addition to the building expansion, the hospital group owns additional land on its campus. “The next step would be expanding building capacity on the campus,” she said. “We are trying to stay ahead of the growth curve of the pediatric population in this area, which is very challenging.”
