HARLINGEN — A groundbreaking ceremony took place Monday on a new neuro intensive care unit at Valley Baptist Medical Center that will provide an additional 14 beds to complement the 10 already in use by the neuroscience department.
“We were the first neuro ICU in the Valley and now we want to continue to be the best neuro ICU,” said Dr. Ameer Hassan, who helped create the neuroscience department at Valley Baptist.
He hailed the arrival of additional beds.
“You have patients with aneurysms, subarachnoid hemorrhage, intracerebral hemorrhage,” Hassan said. “These are deadly types of disease that we have shown that, with improved critical care, patients have better outcomes.”
The neuro ICU has been a “work in progress” that began three or four years ago, said Jennifer Bartnesky-Smith, chief strategy officer for Valley Baptist.
“We were finally able to secure corporate funding for the project,” she said. “It’s a $7 million project, and what we’ll be doing with the project is building out a shell space that we have in our northwest tower. From a Neurosciences Institute perspective it’s hugely important to the expansion, growth and continued excellence of our program.”
The project was planned to begin last year but the pandemic put those plans on hold.
“All of our business initiatives, all of our capital projects got put on hold as we went through COVID,” she said. “We’re very excited as a hospital, as a medical community, to be able to offer this to our community.”
Hassan said the extra beds were needed long before the pandemic hit.
“We’ve always had the busiest neuro ICU service in the Valley,” he said. “We needed these beds even prior to COVID. We need it, now obviously because we’re doing it, we will have more ICU beds in general which helps us with our COVID capacity.”
Bartnesky-Smith said work should be completed around the end of the year.
