CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Driscoll Children's Hospital in Corpus Christi is the only designated children’s hospital in South Texas. The hospital's service area covers 33,000 square miles and 31 counties.
Aside from Driscoll's clinics and specialty centers located in Brownsville, Harlingen and McAllen, parents and guardians that lived in the Rio Grande Valley had to drive hours for a hospital stay at Driscoll.
All that will soon change as the first designated children’s hospital in the Rio Grande Valley is set to open in Edinburg by May of 2024.
President of the hospital Matt Wolthoff says this will make a big difference for the half a million children in the Valley who have been historically underserved.
"We fly specialists down on a daily basis to see children in the market, but that only addresses a portion of the need," Wolthoff said.
The new hospital will have 119 licensed beds and around 700 administrative and clinical staff members. Driscoll has held hiring events in the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi to help fill those positions. Their next stop is San Antonio.
"A lot of young, talented health care professionals leave the Valley to go and work in San Antonio or even go to just to get training in San Antonio," said Wolthoff.
"Our message to them is, ‘This is the perfect time. If you have a passion of taking care of children and you want to come make a difference at home, this is the perfect time to come home,’' he added.
Wolthoff says they are well over halfway done with filling those positions and have done well with recruiting nurses. The roadblock they face is finding pediatric specialists when the supply and demand of them is offset.
"It is mindboggling in terms of the low numbers that are coming out of training and the need for those specialists across the country," he added.
The Valley Baptist Legacy Foundation in Harlingen has stepped into help Driscoll with a $17 million donation to help recruit pediatric specialists to the Rio Grande Valley. That is the largest gift Driscoll has received since the hospital's inception. Wolthoff says they're already putting those dollars to work and is optimistic about the future of Driscoll's newest hospital.
"That’s going to be a transformation gift for us. We are already putting those dollars to work to recruit specialists and increase access to care," he said.
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