Houston - It’s been four years now since New Orleanians, and New Orleans med students had a large teaching hospital to go to for care, and instruction. But in Houston, Texas, the medical center is already the world's largest,generating well over 70,000 jobs, and it continues to grow.Ever since Katrina, the state and the feds have had a tough time getting together on a new hospital complex for Mid City. And while the local medical community tries to figure things out, medicine in Texas, is savings lives, and generating billions of dollars.
About five miles from Houston’s main skyline, sits Houston’s second skyline and it too is one of the nation’s biggest.
“The square footage of Texas medical center is larger than Fort Worth, San Antonio, and El Paso combined,” Said Jeff Moseley who is part of the Greater Houston Partnership.
Taking up over 1,000 acres, the Texas Medical Center is the largest in the world. On a footprint the size of lower Manhattan it consists of 13 hospitals it contains 47 medical related institutions, including two med schools, and four nursing schools.
'”It's done more than just provide a source for the insured and uninsured, it's really been one of our larger economic engines,” Said Houston’s mayor, Bill White
Five million patients come here each year, including this High school sophomore Addison Marshal, from the New Orleans area.
Marshal gets chemotherapy at MD Anderson Hospital once a week.
The Marshal family moved to Houston right after Katrina. Addison now gets care at what's considered one of the top cancer hospitals in the world.
Addison’s father Jack Marshall says he didn’t want to move to Houston at first.
“It was very difficult to leave New Orleans, it's a place I love, that fateful day we never understood the reason why we would wind up in Houston but having a child with cancer answered that.'
There are tutors there to help Addison study and game rooms when he wants to unwind.
MD Anderson has 600 rooms and is in the middle of another expansion. Thanks to smart design, they're growing up, not out, and there's been no interruption in patient care.
“We have a little over 11 million square feet under construction which is a lot of space.” Said Richard Wainerdi, the director of the Texas Medical center
The medical center started with a dream.
“The person who had the idea was Ernst Bertner. He had been the staff surgeon for General Pershing when he came back from World War One and was distressed that in Houston after the war there wasn't a single certified doctor.” With Bertner's vision and a donation from MD Anderson, the medical center grew. Forty cities around the world are now trying to grow medical centers like this one and the center's director is proud to share.
Comparing New Orleans to Houston is almost ridiculous, like comparing apples to watermelons, but as New Orleans struggles to build a new medical complex clearly there are lessons to be learned in Houston. All of the 47 institutions are non-profits and none pays any property tax.
New Orleans has had many chances, but missed the mark. When Bertner made his donation in Texas, New Orleans had some of the most respected doctors in the world. But because of what the Texas medical center had to offer, pioneering heart surgeon, Dr. William Debakey, who was born in Louisiana and educated at Tulane, chose to make his mark in Houston, and the fear is others will leave too. As head of the New Orleans biosciences district which includes the new LSU VA hospital footprint, District Directory Jim McNamara worries about the future of medical education, and health care in New Orleans
Mc Namara says ”We're losing the top quality students because it's not attractive...they like to be near their facilities where their very safe.”
Land is critical. The Texas medical center has grown to fill nearly every square foot of its thousand acre site.
“The number one mistake was not to buy enough land when it was cheap,” said Wainerdi.
The proposed LSU VA hospital, would go on a 70 acre site in Mid City, and in spite of opposition, the state is now trying to buy up the remaining property.
“Ultimately when you look at the flexibility Old Charity locks us in at 426, that's forever and it doesn't meet the needs of a teaching hospital,” said McNamara
If New Orleans is looking for a model, as to how it can grow a medical center that is a key component to a city's economic well-being.
It needs to look no further than five hours to the west, in the city of Houston.
Unlike empty promises in New Orleans, construction cranes there are a common site, and in spite of concerns about health care reform, when it comes to medical center growth in Houston, the potential appears limitless in 1945, businessman Monroe Dunaway Anderson left $19 million dollars in his estate for the Anderson foundation, making it at that time, the largest charitable fund ever created in Texas. Major projects now underway at the center include a new maternity center, valued at over a half billion dollars, and a neurological research institute, expected to cost over 200 million dollars.
