Exclusive tour: $1.3 billion Parkland Hospital 90 percent complete
Dallas Business Journal
The $1.3 billion Parkland Memorial Hospital under construction on Harry Hines Boulevard in Dallas is 90 percent complete and on track to open by May 2015.
The 2.1 million-square-foot replacement hospital is the largest construction project in the region and one of the largest health care construction projects underway in the nation.
Workers are beginning to move in some of the furniture and medical equipment including the high-powered lights in the trauma rooms and the anesthesia booms.
A high-speed trauma elevator will whisk patients from the two helipads atop the 17-story hospital to the emergency department on the ground floor at 600 feet per minute — about twice the usual speed, Lou Saksen, senior vice president of new Parkland construction, told me and Dallas Business Journal photographer Jake Dean on a recent tour. Glycol pipes installed under the helipads will keep the surface from freezing, said David Graham, project director for BARA, the joint venture for the new Parkland construction.
The 865 patient rooms are identical, making it easier for nurses, doctors and other health care professionals as they move from room to room, Saksen said. The hospital will open with 775 private patient beds and have space for 90 more. It will have 96 neonatal intensive care beds, 48 labor and delivery rooms, 108 emergency rooms and 27 operating rooms.
Its $1.326 billion budget is $55 million more than originally anticipated because it’s being built to handle more patients than originally projected, Saksen said. In the emergency department alone, original projections called for 160,000 patients in 2015. The existing hospital saw 80,000 more more patients than that last year, due in part to more patients newly insured under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, Saksen said.
“The biggest challenge we’ve faced is the project is so big and it’s taken so long,” Saksen said. “The longer projects take, the more complicated they are.”