New Fort Belvoir Hospital Should Ease Growing Pains

A key piece of the military's base realignment program is about to rise from the grounds of Fort Belvoir in southeast Fairfax County.

Construction is scheduled to start next month on a $747 million hospital that will vastly enhance Fort Belvoir's medical capacity and capabilities and allow the Army to gradually close Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Northwest Washington while moving its resources to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.

Groundbreaking for the new, as yet unnamed Belvoir hospital off Route 1 occurred this month. The military hospital, with 120 inpatient beds, will replace the 50-year-old DeWitt Army Community Hospital and its 45 beds and is scheduled to be open for patients in spring 2011, DeWitt spokeswoman Jennifer Albert said.

Congress is on the verge of approving a veterans health-care bill with $220 million to pay for the first stage of the hospital's construction, Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) said at the groundbreaking.

"Congress is committed to provide the medical treatment and rehabilitation of our troops," Moran said, "not just to a satisfactory level, but to a level that we can be proud of. The new hospital embodies that effort.

"I am proud that it will be located in Northern Virginia. It will serve as the exemplary model of how we should treat our wounded warriors."

The six-level, 1.2 million-square-foot hospital is a key piece in the puzzle of shifting resources in the region, part of which is the military's expected move of about 20,000 employees to the Fort Belvoir area. The Pentagon is integrating its health-care assets in the Washington area instead of maintaining separate hospitals for each service branch. So as Fort Belvoir prepares to open its facility in 2011, the Navy and Army will be combining their premier hospitals in Bethesda in a center to be renamed the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

The new Fort Belvoir hospital, with an array of new services and specialty clinics, will have a much larger number of clients, both active and retired military members. DeWitt and its associated clinics in Northern Virginia have 89,000 clients, which the Army calls beneficiaries, per year. The new hospital will have about 221,000, roughly the same as the new Walter Reed hospital, which is expected to have about 219,000 beneficiaries a year, Albert said.

To determine where beneficiaries will be treated, military officials drew a line that bisects the Washington region horizontally, running through the middle of Fairfax County roughly along Route 50. But the boundaries of the service area are being tinkered with and will not prevent those now using Walter Reed or Bethesda from continuing to do so, Albert said.

The new hospital, in addition to nearly tripling bed capacity, will have numerous features not found at DeWitt. It will have an intensive care unit, a 12-bed psychiatric unit, a laser eye center, an oncology clinic, a dental and oral surgery clinic, chiropractic services, a cardiac catheter lab and a residential substance abuse treatment facility. It will also have two parking garages with 2,600 spaces, which is significant because parking at DeWitt is at a premium.

"There's been a lot of hard work and planning to get it right, to make it a world-class facility," Albert said.

The new hospital will be able to provide a number of services previously available only at Walter Reed, such as the Warriors in Transition program to help returning veterans, Albert said. The number of operating rooms also will increase from three to 10, and obstetric capacity will expand from 10 babies to 18.

The hospital will contribute to increased traffic in the Route 1 corridor as projected from the base realignment and closure (BRAC) plan, Albert said. But because patients don't all arrive in the morning and leave at day's end, Army officials do not expect the hospital alone to affect traffic "a great deal," she said.

The project is on an accelerated schedule, to fit the BRAC timetable, and construction is expected to be finished by late summer 2010, giving the Army Medical Command staff the rest of the year to move in and prepare for the 2011 opening.

The Army Corps of Engineers used a combined "design-bid-build" process for the hospital, which accelerates design and construction while keeping costs and schedules under control, Albert said. A construction contractor oversees design, costs and scheduling, and the Army hired a joint venture of HDR of Alexandria and Dewberry of Fairfax, both architectural engineering firms, for that role.

In turn, the joint venture hired the Arlington County office of Turner Construction Co., along with Gilbane Building Co. of Providence, R.I., to do the actual construction. Turner is a national firm that completed $7.5 billion worth of projects in 2005, and Gilbane has been involved in building Union Station, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the distinctive, inverted trapezoid building housing the Center for Innovative Technology near Dulles International Airport.