Holy Cross Hospital Celebrates a Milestone

Holy Cross Hospital reached a milestone on April 18, delivering its 100,000th baby since 2000.

“This is a great, great day for the hospital. This is an amazing accomplishment,” President and CEO Kevin Sexton said in a videotaped speech to medical professionals, mothers and their children, who were born at the hospital since 2000.

 “All the people who have worked to get people prenatal care when they need it and couldn’t afford it, and to get them the best possible care when they came to the hospital are the reasons why this hospital delivers one out of every eight babies” born in Maryland, he said.

During the 1990s, birth rates were falling “by 2.5 percent in the state and 3.5 percent at Holy Cross,” Sexton said in the video.

Hoping to help increase birth rates by providing more resources to expectant mothers, Holy Cross, one of the largest hospitals in Maryland, more than doubled its building size since the ‘90s and built nine additional labor and delivery rooms, 68 private rooms and a new neonatal intensive care unit, Sexton said.

“We saw change” brought by increased “immigration and revitalization of D.C.’s inner suburbs,” Sexton said. He said that the birth rates at Holy Cross increased by 26 percent, more than five times the state’s birth rate.

In fact, he said, if all the Holy Cross babies born since 2000 lived in one city, that city would be the second largest in Maryland, second only to Baltimore. It took Columbia 50 years to grow to be nearly 100,000 people; Holy Cross did it in just 12 years, according to the press release.

“We want to give everybody the best care. Wherever they come from before, wherever they go to after, everybody gets great care here,” Sexton said, thanking his medical team.