Project Type
Electrical Construction
Project Owner
Driscoll Children's Hospital
General Contractor
Fulton Construction
Signs Contractor
FSG Signs
Electrical Contractor
FSG
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Driscoll Children’s Hospital Corpus Christi, TX

Case Study
FSG Delivers Full-Service, Ongoing Project Success for Local GC and Hospital

Challenge

Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas is a 191-bed tertiary care center offering 32 medical and 13 surgical specialties. The hospital serves a vast area of South Texas and treats more than 100,000 children every year from 31 surrounding counties. Since 1953, the hospital has been the leading provider of children’s medical care for citizens of South Texas, and in recent years the foundation that supports the hospital decided to invest heavily in upgrading and expanding the hospital’s capabilities.

A major renovation and expansion project broke ground in 2016, with plans to construct a new five-story North Pavilion building in front of the hospital to house a new outpatient surgery center and pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). The first floor of the new building would house the new surgery center and an outpatient lab. The new PICU was designed to feature 16 patient-centered private rooms, offering privacy and a high level of technology. Once complete, the new North Pavilion would be connected to the hospital’s main lobby by a concourse.

Additional plans involved expanding and renovating the main hospital building’s Operating Room (OR). This renovation would provide two additional OR suites and give the hospital a self-contained OR with centrally located supply areas, equipment areas, and a sterile processing center. Other later-phase projects would include an upgrade to the neonatal intensive care unit and radiology waiting areas. Finally, Driscoll's plans included enhancements throughout the hospital, including the relocation of the hospital’s helipad and expansion of the parking garage.

Driscoll Children’s Hospital understood the importance of these projects, not just for the local community in Corpus Christi, but for the region as well. With expectations running high, the hospital needed a top-quality General Contractor they could trust to execute their plans. Therefore, Driscoll Children’s Hospital engaged the services of the area’s most established and trusted General Contractor, Fulton Construction. For Fulton, project success was primarily dependent on assembling the right team, and for the electrical construction work, their first pick was FSG.

Solution

FSG came into the latest project at Driscoll Children's Hospital with an established track record. In recent years, FSG had successfully delivered electrical construction for the hospital’s parking garage, along with a variety of electrical maintenance projects. Most recently, FSG had provided electrical work on an upgrade to the hospital’s central utility plant, and had delivered new signage from FSG Signs in Austin as part of Driscoll Children's Hospital's rebranding effort.

For the North Pavilion expansion project, FSG delivered quality work on schedule and on budget for Driscoll Children’s Hospital despite having to confront many of the challenges common to large construction projects, as well as some uncommon ones that are unique to life on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Once the latest construction project began, the hospital Board of Directors and Driscoll Foundation administrators decided to accelerate the timeline of Phase 2 of the project and roll it into the current work, taking the construction from a two-story building to its full future capacity of five levels. This naturally involved a complete re-working of the project schedule, but FSG was willing and able to accommodate the change and adapted its project management to encompass the additional work scope.

Other unexpected changes involved the weather. When Hurricane Hanna swept by Corpus Christi in July 2020 just one month before the end of the project, all parties involved quickly pivoted into “Corpus Christi Mode”, a common behavior during hurricane season when unexpected tropical storms can change everyone’s plans for a period of days, weeks, and sometimes months. In this case, the interruption was brief but the project did pause for a time as all team members joined together to assist the community following Hanna’s quick passage through the area.

For FSG, these unforeseen circumstances were simply new opportunities to rise to the occasion and deliver on its promise of excellent service for its customers.

Result

In August 2020, Driscoll Children’s Hospital North Pavilion opened its doors to glowing reviews from project ownership and the community at large. Following the grand opening, planning began on the next phase of the hospital’s expansion project, and as the year turned FSG was involved in ongoing work to expand the main hospital’s surgical center.

For Fulton Construction, the North Pavilion project represented another landmark construction project completed as planned for a grateful customer. For FSG, the project further cemented its reputation with GC’s and project owners alike as Corpus Christi’s preferred electrical construction contractor, with the depth and breadth of experience and capabilities required to reliably deliver a diversified service offering for the city’s most important projects.

The Driscoll Children’s Hospital projects illustrate the value of an established working relationship between FSG and a project owner, and between FSG and a General Contractor. This value is critical in every market FSG serves, but it is essential in smaller markets like Corpus Christi. Projects like those undertaken by Driscoll Children's Hospital have allowed FSG’s Corpus Christi branch to set deep roots in a community with a long collective memory of public and private construction projects, of who executed them, and most importantly, of how those companies went about getting the job done.

Excellence always matters. However, in smaller markets where people routinely do business with neighbors they know, excellence might matter just a little bit more.

FSG projects consistently deliver excellence for our  customers, for our employees, and for the communities we serve.

We see each project as an opportunity to embrace our mission and provide superior value through quality products, service, and support.

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