Shriners Hospital for Children in the Texas Medical Center is planning to close in 2021, officials said Thursday, part of an effort to consolidate all its area care at the charity system’s Galveston facility.

The closure, which will end Shriners’ 100-year presence in Houston, will mean all four specialty care departments — acute burns, orthopedic conditions, spinal injuries and cleft lip and palate abnormalities — will be provided in Galveston. Currently, the burn unit is in Galveston and the other three are in Houston.

“This will make more efficient use of resources and enable us to provide our patients who need more than one type of care to receive it all in one place,” said Mel Bower, director of marketing at the Shriners national offices in Tampa. “It makes more strategic sense.”

Bower said the decision, made last fall, was driven by a desire to build one premier hospital, not financial concerns. Plans are still fluid, he said, but the closure in Houston and consolidation of services in Galveston should be finished sometime in the first half of 2021.

Bower added that the burn center’s presence in Galveston was a major determinant in the decision to consolidate there rather than Houston. He said the requirements to provide such care are very complicated.

The burn center also is considered one of the nation’s best. It has the highest survival rate of patients with major burn injury — greater than 80 percent — of all U.S. hospitals, according to the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, which provides the center’s doctors and nurses.

But the center was criticized in 2018 because of allegations that some faculty members provided inappropriate treatment to some research patients. UTMB subsequently suspended all burn-injury studies on human subjects at the burn center as well as its own campus while it reviews the matter and develops a plan of corrective action. That suspension, initiated in January 2019, is still under effect, a UTMB spokesman said Thursday.

The Texas Medical Center Shriners keeps a lower profile, mostly because it’s surrounded by Texas Children’s and Children’s Memorial Hermann hospitals. Texas Children's is the nation's largest pediatric hospital -- and is consistently ranked among the best in U.S. News & World Report's annual survey.

The Houston Shriners hospital is licensed for 40 inpatient beds and performs a little more than 1,000 surgeries annually, according to its website. It reports treating 3,000 patients in 2019.

In contrast, Texas Children’s Medical Center campus has 694 licensed pediatric beds and performs more than 20,000 surgeries annually. Children’s Memorial Hermann has 234 licensed pediatric beds and performs 6,000 surgeries annually.

Shriners’ history in Houston dates to 1920, when it opened as the Arabia Temple Crippled Children’s Clinic in the Baptist Sanitarium downtown. It has been housed in a number of different locations in the city before taking root in the medical center in 1949. It built the facility in its current location in 1996.

The Shriners system, which began as a response to the polio epidemic in the 1920s and accepts patients regardless of the family’s ability to pay, comprises 20 hospitals in the U.S., one in Mexico and one in Canada.

Bower said it is still too early in the process to know what it will do with its existing building in the medical center.

todd.ackerman@chron.com

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