St. David's Round Rock adds more beds, operating rooms as Willamson County grows
St. David's Round Rock Medical Center will open up a new floor of 34 beds on Jan. 23 in a $53.1 million project that is part of the expansion among hospitals in Central Texas, particularly in Williamson County.
"This shows a commitment by the hospital to this community," said Dr. Jay Pandya, interventional cardiologist at St. David's Round Rock Medical Center. "This is a chance for us to continue to serve the community and provide high quality, cutting-edge care, and also build our center up and the population we serve and continue to grow as a referral center."
The project built a new fourth and fifth floors onto an existing tower at the hospital at 2400 Round Rock Ave. The fifth floor has been finished out with the 34 intermediate care beds and is ready for patients. Intermediate care is for patients who have left the intensive care unit but need more care than a typical surgical medical unit.
The fourth floor will be finished out after the fifth floor reaches capacity, which the hospital estimates will happen within two years. The expansion also added four new operating rooms, two of which are in use.
Round Rock's population grew 19.6% from 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Williamson County's population grew 44% in that time.
As businesses move into the area, they are bringing families with them, which adds up to patients in the hospital, said Jeremy Barclay, chief executive officer at St. David's Round Rock Medical Center.
"Capacity has been busy for years," Barclay said. "We've been trying to keep up with the growth in Central Texas. This will help with that, and also give us room to continue to grow in the future."
The hospital hopes the expansion will solve some of the capacity problems by avoiding transferring people to another hospital because of a lack of beds, as well as speeding up the process of moving patients out of the emergency room and into a bed or out of the post anesthesia unit following surgery and into a bed.
It has added an additional 50 staff members for this expansion. This staff started 18 months to a year ago, Barclay said, to prepare for the opening of the new unit.
The hospital, which opened in 1983 as a one-story building that looked more like a school, as Barclay described it, has the ability to grow even further. This tower can add another two stories and another part of the hospital can add another two stories.
As the hospital has grown, the services it can provide also have grown, especially in cardiac care through its Austin Heart Hospital on site, and in trauma care. This year, the hospital started doing transcatheter aortic valve replacements, which avoid open-heart surgery to replace a valve and speed up the recovery time.
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The new operating rooms are the same size as the hospital's largest operation rooms, but they have more versatile lights that allow different types of equipment to be moved into the room without getting in the way of the lights or having to move the patient.
In the 34 intermediate care unit rooms, each room has breakaway doors that can fold in to allow a surge of staff to enter during an emergency. Some also are negative pressure rooms for infectious disease and have doors that are automated to open and close with the wave of a hand.
The rooms also allow for continuous heart and neurology monitoring and dialysis equipment to be hooked up to the wall where the plumbing is hidden, rather than having to run water tubes to the bathroom.
These rooms can be converted into intensive care unit beds during an emergency such as the recent pandemic, when ICU beds were filled.
More hospital growth is happening throughout Williamson County, especially in the Round Rock and North Austin areas.
Ascension Seton Williamson Medical Center in Round Rock is about to almost double in size with a second six-story tower, adding two more operating rooms and adding 160 beds to the 181-bed hospital. It's a $230 million investment. That completion date has not been set.
Baylor Scott & White Round Rock is also doubling in size with a $220 million expansion that will add a neonatal intensive care unit to the hospital, as well as expand the emergency department, add surgical suites and beds. It saw a 30% increase in patient visits in the past five years.
St. David's North Austin Medical Center added 30 beds to its now 97-bed neonatal intensive care unit in July and added a new tower to its women's center in August.
Dell Children's Medical Center opened a second hospital in North Austin in April at 9010 N. Lake Creek Parkway.
Texas Children's Hospital is opening its first hospital outside of the Houston area on Feb. 1 at 9835 N. Lake Creek Parkway in Northwest Austin.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: St. David's Round Rock opens $53.1 million expansion
