LETTER FROM THE CEO AND CHAIR
This edition of our annual Report to the Community was quite literally 100 years in the making. Throughout 2017, University Health System has celebrated a century of service to our community — dating from a Friday morning, Feb. 2, 1917, when the Robert B. Green Memorial Hospital opened its doors to patients.
Our original hospital, the Robert B. Green — named for a crusading county judge and state senator — was founded and built because county and city leaders recognized a great need for a hospital where all people, rich and poor, would be welcomed and cared for. When it opened, the newspaper described it as “the most complete, modern and well-equipped building of its kind in the entire South.”
From that auspicious start, we’ve continued to grow to meet the needs of the region. That growth included the creation of the Bexar County Hospital District in 1955; the opening in 1968 of a teaching hospital (known today as University Hospital); the opening of the world-renowned Texas Diabetes Institute in 1999, and the construction over many years of a network of more than two dozen primary, specialty, preventive and school-based healthcare centers designed to bring services closer to where people live and work. And most recently, it included the opening of the six-story clinical building at the Robert B. Green Campus in 2013 and the million-square-foot Sky Tower at University Hospital in 2014.
You can read a bit more about our history in the pages that follow, or a lot more online at universityhealthsystem.com/100birthday. You’ll forgive us if we’re tooting our own horn. We are extraordinarily proud to be part of a mission-driven organization dedicated to improving the health of our neighbors, discovering new and better treatments, and training the next generation of health professionals to continue that mission. But we’re not only looking toward the past.
Our future became a little brighter this year with the approval by Bexar County Commissioners and our Board of Managers to begin the next phase of our Capital Improvement Program, a Women and Children’s Tower that will include high-risk maternity services, an expanded Level IV NICU and dedicated, state-of-the-art pediatric beds, along with advanced endoscopy services and a new heart and vascular center to be constructed on the first floor of our Sky Tower.
We think that’s fitting — to salute the past century and begin a vital project to ensure the very best care for our smallest — and future — patients, as we look ahead to the next century. What will it bring? Stay tuned. We think the best is yet to come.