Share
SAN ANTONIO — The Engineering News-Record (ENR) has named the U.S. Department of Veterans San Antonio Outpatient Clinic the Best Health Care Project and an Excellence in Safety Award of Merit winner in the Texas/Louisiana region.
The clinic, built by Jacobsen Construction Company and designed by Hoefer Welker, stood out as the top-rated health care project in one of ENR’s largest and most competitive contest regions because of the project team’s performance in the areas of innovation, quality craftsmanship, quality of the design, teamwork, overcoming challenges and the facility’s impact on the community. The project’s safety award reflected the construction team’s achievement of zero OSHA-recordable incidents and the extensive efforts that were made on the jobsite to protect craftworkers from hot weather, height-associated risks and other challenging hazards.
The two awards, first announced by ENR in mid-July, will be formally presented to project leaders later this year.
The 240,000 square-foot Veterans Affairs (VA) clinic, located on a 26-acre site in San Antonio, includes more than 700 patient rooms and is home to a wide range of health care offerings including primary care, mental health treatment, consolidated medical-surgical specialties, diagnostic services, dental care, eye care, women’s health services, radiology services and pharmacy services. It hosts between about 800 and 1,000 patient visits per day.
The clinic is a key, centrally located resource for the San Antonio area’s enormous military community, which includes more than a quarter million veterans. It offers the VA’s most sophisticated outpatient health care environment to date, with a focus on “upstream” care that prevents more serious health problems through early, active and integrated treatment — reducing strain on VA hospitals in the process. The clinic’s design includes a 51,000 square-foot centralized area for staff collaboration consistent with the VA’s Patient Aligned Care Team (PACT) initiative that was implemented to help provide comprehensive and personalized team-based care for each patient.
Jacobsen and Hoefer Welker collaborated closely with the project owner (US Federal Properties Co.) and the end-user/client (the VA) on every aspect of the $72.4 million project, which broke ground in April 2019 and was finished in August 2021.