South Side’s community hospital gets major updates and a new name
Until Mission Trails Baptist Hospital opened 10 years ago, Southwest General was the only hospital serving the South Side for the better part of three decades.
On Tuesday, Southwest General administrators announced not only a multimillion-dollar investment in upgrades and a name change, they also emphasized their continuing commitment to a historically medically underserved community.
The 327-bed acute care facility at 7400 Barlite will now be known as Texas Vista Medical Center.
The hospital is owned by Dallas-based Steward Health Care, the largest physician-led private hospital operator in the nation with 38 facilities spread across nine states.
Steward has been renovating the hospital over the last 14 months, including $1.5 million in telemetry services improvements, $1.2 million in operating room upgrades and $400,000 on its Level III neonatal intensive care unit.
“We need to not be burdened by our past, but look toward our future,” said Jonathan Turton, president of Texas Vista Medical Center and former CEO of Baptist Medical Center. “We’re going to make a difference here on the South Side of San Antonio at a hospital owned by physicians, not Wall Street or hedge funds.”
Turton, who was hired in January 2020, led the hospital through its toughest challenge yet: COVID-19.
Residents who live on this part of the city are disproportionately affected by the virus. Because of its location, the former Southwest General was a key transfer destination for rural community hospitals in South Texas.
“We knew it was the crown jewel of the South Side; it just needed a little polishing.”
Dr. Sanjay Shetty, Steward Health Care president
At the peak of the pandemic, Turton said, the hospital was treating 90 COVID patients. Over the course of the crisis, 130 of his employees contracted the coronavirus.
District 4 Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia noted the pandemic has exacerbated health issues that have long affected her constituents and her own family: COVID-19 killed seven family members on her father’s side.
She presented a resolution from the City Council at Tuesday’s renaming ceremony, which coincided with National Doctors Day, and recognized how the front-line workers have worked diligently and with passion to save people throughout the pandemic at great personal risk.
“They kept showing up for us in our darkest moments,” she said.
Dr. Sanjay Shetty, Steward’s president, said the renaming felt like a “rebirth” because the hospital is investing in efforts to lessen the gap in health disparities by working closer with other organizations that serve the community.
“We knew it was the crown jewel of the South Side; it just needed a little polishing,” Shetty said.
The hospital is forging partnerships with community organizations, including the San Antonio Food Bank and medical practice Wellmed, through a new program called Healthy Horizons.
As part of the initiative, Southside ISD identified 13 grandparents raising their grandchildren and brought them to the hospital Tuesday for their COVID-19 vaccine.
Texas Vista Medical Center, which serves as a teaching hospital, is starting a new residency program this summer training 15 internal medicine physicians from the University of Incarnate Word’s School of Osteopathic Medicine, which is located at Brooks City Base.
Turton says the hospital also plans to hire eight additional doctors.