While growth is exciting, Cook Children’s know it brings challenges that can impact team members, visitors, neighbors and our community. Cook Children’s want to share the ‘what and why’ about the work the health care system is doing to continue to serve children and families.

Growing with the Community

Fort Worth, the greater DFW metro area and the surrounding regions that rely on Cook Children’s for specialty pediatric care are growing. Cook Children’s is prepared to grow with them.

“North Texas is expanding rapidly, and we’re here to match that expansion,” said Spencer Seals, senior vice president of Real Estate, Construction, and Facilities Planning for Cook Children's Health Care System. “Through the West Tower and other construction projects, we are building future capacity.”

With population growth comes increased demand for Cook Children’s services. For example, as the largest Level IV NICU in North Texas, Cook Children's cares for critically ill babies from hospitals both nearby and hundreds of miles away.

Cook Children’s also has one of the busiest emergency rooms in the nation, treating broken bones, severely ill children and patients transported by plane, helicopter and ambulance in need of lifesaving care. It’s not uncommon to see 500 to 600 patients in a single day during the peak season, with many requiring admission to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).

As a result, beds in the PICU and NICU are frequently full, and children and families must wait for beds. To make sure Cook Children’s can be here for every child, the health care system created a 10-year plan designed to expand the campus and meet the needs of patients and families for decades to come.

Progress and Milestones

So far this year, Cook Children’s has made progress or completed numerous projects.

Kids’ Place
To make room for the West Tower expansion, the Kids’ Place Child Development Center - a daycare center for Cook Children’s staff - relocated from Southland Avenue to a new facility on Cook Children's Fort Worth campus along 9th Avenue between Cooper and Pruitt streets.

West Tower Infrastructure Takes Shape
Several foundational phases of the West Tower project are now complete.

Phase 1 of excavation, including installation of two tower cranes and construction of the basement structure, has been completed. The former Alliance for Children building has been demolished, and construction of the West Tower Garage is underway.

Meanwhile, crews continue expanding the South Utility Plant, which provides electrical power across the campus. As part of that work, teams excavated a major utility tunnel beneath 7th Avenue.

Building the Foundation

Much of the construction visible today is creating the infrastructure necessary to support the future West Tower.

The 10-story, 760,000-square-foot tower will house a new PICU, an expanded Heart Center and a Transitional Care Unit. It will also create opportunities to expand the NICU and Emergency Department within the existing hospital.

Many of the lane closures along 8th Avenue, Rosedale Street and throughout the Medical District have been necessary to relocate and upgrade utilities that support the future building. This work includes:

• Sewer lines

• Storm drains

• Internet access

• Irrigation

• Water flow

• Fire water

Teams are also relocating gas lines and Oncor power lines.

Cook Children’s hopes to wrap up the 8th road work by November.

After that, all West Tower construction should be contained to the Cook Children’s Fort Worth campus. There will still be construction on Rosedale, but that work is being done by the city on behalf of the entire Medical District.

As construction continues, Cook Children’s construction website is the best place to find up-to-date information of lane, road and sidewalk closures.

Seals explained that his team and their partners have done everything they can to mitigate the impact the construction has on the community, staff, and patients. For example, Cook Children’s avoided road closures on 7^th Avenue, where utility work needed to be done, by having crews tunneling beneath the street.

Still, Seals knows the lane closures and traffic can be a challenge. However, if Cook Children’s is going to grow with the community, the utility work was always a necessary growing pain.

“In order to meet the needs of the Cook Children’s system, we had to do this infrastructure work with or without the West Tower,” Seals explained. “And in order to expand the NICU, PICU and the Heart Center, we needed to add the tower. There is literally not enough room to do that without the West Tower addition.”

What to Expect Next

Before utilities can be connected to the West Tower, crews must lower portions of Terrell Avenue and 7th Avenue. This work will create the proper grade needed to manage stormwater around the future building. Terrell Avenue is expected to reopen to both pedestrian and vehicle traffic by summer 2027.

Over the next six months, Cook Children's expects to reach several additional milestones, including:

• Completion of utility work along 8th Avenue

• Continued construction of new parking garages

• Installation of three additional tower cranes

• Completion of the first of five major phases of West Tower construction

• Advancement of the second phase of basement construction

Looking Ahead

By late 2030, Cook Children’s will have added more than 200 beds in the West Tower, renovated parts of the hospital and built in extra space to prepare for future growth.

The West Tower reflects Cook Children’s growth - from 56 private rooms in the PICU to a state-of-the-art Heart Center, with everything a patient needs from surgery to discharge in contiguous space to more beds and spaces for families to heal.

With the space vacated in the existing hospital, Cook Children’s is undertaking a 155,000 square-foot renovation, including more cancer services, highly specialized interventional radiology and the addition of 37 NICU beds to bring the total to nearly 150 beds.

For more than a century, Cook Children’s has risen to meet the needs of the moment - the health care system has expanded its campus, evolved its technology and added services to improve the health and well-being of all children in its care. This expansion is a continuation of the system’s Promise, “Everything for the child.”

Cook Children’s appreciates your patience. You can read more about the expansion in this story, which is updated with the latest construction impacts.

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This campaign will help fund an expansion project that will ensure the precise combination of clinical facilities and operations are in place to treat the sickest children, while best protecting Cook Children’s staff and the community from the spread of infectious diseases.

The expansion will include the construction of a new 6-bed infectious diseases critical care unit (CCU) and a 24-hour solutions center with dedicated incident command space. An existing 20-bed unit will become a dedicated infectious diseases unit for the treatment of non-critical contagious patients such as those hospitalized for flu, COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and other viruses. A 32-bed medical surgical unit will be added, and the hospital’s simulation lab will be relocated.

“I am beyond excited about the new infectious diseases critical care unit,” Mary Suzanne Whitworth, M.D., medical director of pediatric infectious diseases at Cook Children’s Medical Center, said. “It is humbling to work for a system like Cook Children’s that is always looking for the next thing needed to make pediatric health care better. After spending the last 25 years of my career here I must say, however, that I am not at all surprised that this is in the works. This is a system that never stops rising to the occasion.”

Family-Centered Safety

Since the start of the pandemic, much has been learned about how to maintain safety for staff and guests and expertly care for infectious disease patients now and in the future. These best practices and protocols will be standard design in the infectious diseases units, which will feature specialized air ventilation systems, dedicated areas to put on and take off personal protective equipment (PPE), technology that allows clinicians to closely monitor a patient without having to be directly at the bedside and other heightened protection measures to contain disease spread.

“These units will be used in an effort to place potentially contagious patients in one area,” said Dr. Whitworth. “The goal is to have everybody in one unit with every employee in that specific unit dedicated to being experts in proper PPE donning and doffing, patient and visitor flow and all of the aspects of interrupting the spread of an infectious disease.”

Maintaining a family-centered and supported environment also influenced the design of the new infectious diseases CCU. The decision to limit visitors to Cook Children’s Medical Center during the pandemic was a difficult one for everyone. While Cook Children’s patients have always been allowed at least one family member at their bedside during the outbreak, the spread of the virus demanded that administrators take steps to protect employees and vulnerable patients by restricting the visitation of others within the family unit.

“Segregating families is not who we are as an organization,” said Stan Davis, chief operating officer at Cook Children’s Medical Center. “We promote that when a child is sick and in our hospital, they need family at their bedside to help with treatment and healing. This unit allows our staff to feel comfortable that they’re in the right environment and have the right precautions to be comfortable treating patients, and it allows for our community to understand that in addition to having the best nurses, therapists and support folks in the world, we have the right environment to keep families together.”

Each of the new infectious diseases CCU rooms will have a private bathroom, an accommodation not available in the current critical care space used for contagious patients. This allows parents to stay in the room with their child as long as they would like and reduces the in and out traffic of a parent who may have the same illness as the child due to exposure. Dedicated entrances and exits to these units for staff and visitors will help protect the general hospital environment.

“Re-tooling to deal with the re-emergence of SARS which resulted in lots of health care worker deaths in Canada, for COVID-19 variants already circulating, for Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), for avian flu, for new and old world hemorrhagic fever viruses, or for bioterrorism-related infections like anthrax, is our responsibility,” said Marc Mazade, M.D., medical director of Cook Children’s infection prevention and control. “We’re looking forward to having the facility to do that better than ever.”

To open up space for the infectious diseases CCU, the Cook Children’s simulation lab will be relocated. The simulation lab is an educational space where staff practice using new technologies, innovations and research. Last year, Cook Children’s was the first freestanding children’s hospital in the world to receive full accreditation through the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. The relocated lab will allow for future expansion and growth of this program.

A new 32-bed medical surgical unit will be built to gain back beds repurposed for the infectious diseases unit and to expand Cook Children’s ability to meet the hospitalization needs of the growing communities it serves.

System-Wide Solutions

The design of the new 24-hour solutions center was inspired by lessons learned about system-wide coordination and cooperation throughout the pandemic. Members of all 14 of Cook Children’s Health Care System’s entities worked together in the medical center’s incident command center to coordinate a consistent response to COVID-19 across the entire organization. This consolidation and cooperation allowed Cook Children’s to be nimble, flexible and quick to the ever-changing environment.

The new solutions center will operate year-round under the same premise of consolidation, coordination and consistency. It will be a one-stop-shop for staff and guests of any one of Cook Children’s entities to report or request assistance with a facility or operations issue.

“The solutions center will be a single touch point for staff, patients and families in terms of who they contact for assistance with an operations issue at one of our facilities,” Davis said. The consolidation that will occur is that there will be a joint information system—a communication hub, if you will—that everyone in the system uses, and the issue will be triaged and assigned from there. It’s similar to what you see with a technology help desk.”

Inside the solutions center will be a dedicated incident command center equipped with meeting space that accommodates proper social distancing protocols and communication technology that supports real-time global health updates for rapid, informed decision-making. This is a much needed upgrade from the classroom that doubled as an incident command center during the height of the pandemic.

“We’ve learned with COVID-19 that hospitals can become overwhelmed rapidly,” Dr. Mazade said. “Planning for staff shortages, getting supplies, developing protocols, and getting our teams the most up-to-date information ASAP while combating misinformation is vital to everyone in the organization, to our community partners, and to our community. We need an up-to-date, world-class incident command station built for that.”

Construction for this expansion is currently underway and slated to be complete in 12 months. If you’d like to join the Protecting Your Tomorrows fundraising effort, contact Cook Children’s Health Foundation at 682-885-4105.

"There are a lot of patients who need specialized care or even higher levels of care and it’s really important that in this rapidly growing community that we have that available to these families," said Dr. Hogan, pediatricitian at Cook Children's Pediatrics Prosper Trail.

Dr. Hogan is one of 24 Cook Children's pediatricians currently treating patients in this region of North Texas. She says patients like hers need a place to access specialized and emergency pediatric care without having to drive 30 minutes to an hour away from home.

"A lot families have hardships and are not able to drive that far, or take off work all the time to go to these visits, and having this inpatient hospital and specialized care right her will make it easier for all the families," Dr. Hogan explained.

Construction of Cook Children's Medical Center North is in the initial phases with plans to have a full service hospital completed in 2022. The new hospital will be located on a 23-acre site in Prosper at Windsong Parkway and Highway 380. Having started in October of last year, phase one is already underway with plans to open a primary and urgent care clinic in the fall. An outpatient surgery center and specialty clinic with imaging and lab services will open in 2020.

"I'm really excited about the hospital opening up and being able to refer my patients to specialists, right here in Prosper, and being able to send my patients to get the specialized care that they need, having higher levels of care right across town," said Dr. Hogan. "I think that is going to be really wonderful for the families here."

Currently, Cook Children’s operates eight primary care offices in and around the Town of Prosper. The expansion near Windsong Ranch marks the first time in Cook Children's 101 year history that a full-service hospital has been built outside of Fort Worth.

"Just like the Town of Prosper is family, a close knit community, so is Cook Children’s," said Dr. Hogan. "We are all here wanting your children to be healthy and do better in life and be able to get the care they need to grow up to be happy and healthy adults."