Focus on health care and businesses and jobs will come.
That was part of the message Fort Worth leaders gave during a discussion about health care’s evolution in Tarrant County Wednesday at Texas Christian University.
The event gathered Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price along with Texas Health Resources CEO Barclay Berdan, Bill Thornton, the CEO of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, and Dr. Stuart Flynn, the founding dean of TCU and the UNT Health Science Center’s medical school.
The overwhelming theme, according to D Healthcare Daily, was that Fort Worth is betting on health care as an economic driver by crafting a strong health ecosystem.
“When you attract a business to a community, that leadership looks for two things, in addition to tax breaks and work force. They look at the education system and the health care for their families,” Flynn said during the event. “We become the workforce pipeline.”
According to Kristin Jenkins, senior vice president of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council and moderator of the event, the 90 hospitals in the council have a $14 billion economic impact and supply 237,000 jobs in the region.
“That’s just the hospital sector. We’re not talking about all of health care, even in that number,” Jenkins said.
Read more insights from the leaders about health care’s economic impact here.
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