EDINBURG — After 70 years, Driscoll has just received its largest donation yet that will help provide quality service at its newest hospital — Driscoll Children’s Hospital Rio Grande Valley.
Valley Baptist Legacy Foundation donated $17 million that the hospital plans to use solely for recruitment and start-up costs of the new specialty pediatric doctors who will be relocating to the Valley.
According to Matt Walthoff, president of Driscoll Children’s Hospital Rio Grande Valley, the goal is to use the grant to hire about 20 specialty pediatric doctors over the course of three years.
“We recognize that the access to care for a lot of our kids here in the Valley and their families have been limited,” Walthoff said, adding that this hospital will give families the access to quality care by increasing the number of specialists in the Valley.
Walthoff hopes that the new specialists will allow current pediatric physicians to focus on primary care and use the specialists as a resource.
“This is just an additional level of support in specialization that they (current pediatric physicians in the Valley) now can tap into and ensure that those kids don’t have to travel to go get that specialty care,” Wolthoff said.
Edinburg resident Leonel Garza attended the event with his family and daughter, Audrey Zariah Garza, who is a patient at Driscoll. For Garza, the new hospital is a “blessing” that will allow his family easier access to specialty care.
He recalled traveling to a Driscoll hospital in Corpus Christi just for his daughter to receive the care she needed.
“She used to be with hospice so that was kind of like a gamble for us to take a drive all the way to Corpus,” Garza said. “Having a special needs kid we don’t know what to expect. Anything could happen in seconds so, now that we’ll have one here, it’s kind of a blessing.”
The new hospital, which broke ground in November 2021, will be a new state-of-the-art facility that will include services such as a pediatric intensive care unit, level III neonatal intensive care unit, emergency services and acute inpatient and outpatient surgery.
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