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Apart from just two specialty surgeries, local patients will no longer have to travel to Corpus Christi for care once the new Driscoll Children’s Hospital Rio Grande Valley opens its doors. And that time is coming soon.
The new hospital will be located at 2820 W. Michelangelo Drive in Edinburg, where construction began in November 2021, and is scheduled to open in May with a Level 3 neonatal intensive care unit.
Matt Wolthoff, president of Driscoll Children’s Hospital Rio Grande Valley, said it’s designed to provide local residents access to inpatient specialty care.
“All this is about our goal, which is to prevent families from having to travel for specialty care for their children,” Wolthoff said Thursday.
The freestanding hospital measures 175,000 square feet in size with 119 licensed beds including 63 beds in the neonatal ICU, which will be located inside the DHR Women’s Center.
The facility includes eight emergency room beds, eight pediatric ICU beds, 48 pediatric beds and eight surgery suite operating rooms.
“We’re going to offer all of the same services that the Corpus Christi hospital offers with the exception of cardiovascular surgery and elective neurosurgery,” Wolthoff said in comparison of the Driscoll facility in Edinburg and the facility in Corpus Christi. “Until we have a larger mass of those cases here in the Valley then we’ll just continue to do those in Corpus Christi.”
He added that their current cardiovascular team in Corpus is the number one program in the state of Texas in terms of outcomes and number nine in the nation.
The eight-story building in Edinburg will be staffed by a team of almost 800 people including pediatric specialists. As of now, they have hired about 60% of their staff and are continuing to hire.
For those interested in applying, visit driscollcareers.org.
In March 2023 the Valley Baptist Legacy Foundation gifted Driscoll $17 million to support the recruitment of pediatric specialists that will help increase access to care.
“It is an exciting time to be part of the medical field in the Valley,” Wolthoff said, adding that they plan to build a team of specialists that can help provide a full spectrum of specialty acute care including oncology.
Within the first two years of the hospital’s opening, they plan to run a pediatric residency program.
“We will be training residents to be pediatricians,” he added, noting it will be the first pediatric residency program in the Valley. “Our hope is that they will stay in the community and continue to provide services to our kids here in the Valley,”
Wolfhoff also expressed excitement about the new hospital opening in the Valley as construction takes shape and nears completion.
“We’ve been preparing and anxiously awaiting to get the construction project done and building so we can start moving in and really getting ready to see those kids,” he said. “It’s starting to feel real, which is very, very exciting and we can’t wait to be able to open our doors and provide these services to our children.”
