Groundbreaking Held for $1.27 Billion Hospital


DALLAS — A groundbreaking ceremony took place for the new Parkland Memorial Hospital, which will be situated across the street from its current location on Harry Hines and Medical District Drive.
 
The 2.5-million square foot replacement hospital campus, slated for completion in 2014, will feature a 17-story main hospital building with 862 patient rooms for adults and a 96-neonatal intensive-care unit, and has a price tag of $1.27 billion. Each patient floor will accommodate two 36-bed units built end to end with nursing alcoves tucked along the 300-foot hallways. At the center of the new campus will be a "wellness park," a 2-acre island of trees and plants that can be accessed only by entering through the hospital by patients, staff and visitors.
 
Parkland was built in 1954 as Dallas’s charity hospital and has been reconfigured and remodeled extensively over the past 56 years. The hospital may be best known for being the facility that received a dying President John F. Kennedy following his assassination in 1963.
 
In 2007, a committee appointed by the Dallas County Commissioner recommended that a new public hospital be built to reduce patient waiting time and also to accommodate the increasing number of uninsured county residents. Local support to build a new public facility became obvious in 2008 after 82 percent of voters approved the bond package committing $757 million in public funds.
 
Further support has come from local philanthropists who have pledged or donated $91 million toward the project. The fund-raising goal is $150 million, with the remainder of the construction costs being covered by the hospital’s surplus funds.
 
Parkland’s board of managers had pushed for years to replace the substandard facility and underwent an upgrade in the 1980s.
 
Jim Williams Jr., a Dallas real-estate developer and former hospital board member, stated in a recent report he recalled taking a tour of the facility in the late 1990s and had to go back to the board and tell them that it was impossible to fix the hospital because it would never comply with federal regulations and OSHA.
 
While Dallas County acquired roughly 60 acres of land directly across from the current hospital in hopes of replacing the old facility, the project went dormant for about five years as Dallas County commissioners queried whether the time was right to invest more than $1 billion into a new hospital.
 
Former Commissioner Nancy Judy said recently that she always tried to balance financial concerns about Parkland with the reality of the hospital’s overcrowded conditions, and commended the hospital’s administration for guiding the replacement hospital project through the turmoil.