Stop the Closing of Pediatrics at Ben Taub Hospital

For over 25 years, Ben Taub General Hospital has provided high-quality pediatric inpatient care to the children of Harris County. Through its dedicated team of physicians, nurses, social workers, child life specialists, and affiliated healthcare workers, children can receive a complete range of services from general care to subspecialty and intensive care. It is a critical safety net hospital for Houston’s children.

Currently, the Board of Managers for the Harris County Hospital District (HCHD) is considering a plan to scale back or close the pediatric ward and pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at Ben Taub and to redirect care. We strongly oppose this plan because doing so would detract from HCHD’s mission to “improve our community’s health by delivering high-quality health care to Harris County residents” and would jeopardize the health of our community.

Without the Ben Taub PICU, there would be no pediatric intensive care available within the Hospital District. Furthermore, this move would decrease the number of PICU beds in Houston and potentially require the transfer of these sickest children to distant cities, delaying their care. Even with the current number of PICU beds, children have been transferred as far as Dallas and San Antonio in recent months due to overflow. Closing the inpatient pediatric ward would mean the District would only have 27 inpatient beds for the over 200,000 uninsured children in Harris County.

Ben Taub’s inpatient pediatric service also coordinates more than 20 medical and surgical pediatric subspecialties, most of which are unavailable at other Hospital District facilities. Closing the unit would make essential subspecialties such as nephrology and physical rehabilitative medicine unavailable to pediatric patients within the District. Child and adolescent victims of trauma would lack the specially trained nurses and doctors to provide care tailored to their unique needs as they recover from their injuries.