There’s a hospital bed for every 117 people in Orange.
The city of 138,000 people is the county’s hospital hub with four facilities, including three top 10 hospitals. They have 1,177 beds among them.
Neighboring Anaheim has one more hospital than Orange at five. But they’re smaller. Anaheim has just one top 10 hospital and 972 beds overall.
And the concentration is smaller. Anaheim has a hospital bed for every 315 people.
Orange’s hospitals: the University of California, Irvine Medical Center; St. Joseph Hospital of Orange; Children’s Hospital of Orange County; and Chapman Medical Center.
The hospitals employ more than 9,700 workers. Many more work at medical offices that have grown up around the hospitals.
“What the hospitals have brought to the city is amazing,” Mayor Carolyn Cavecche said.
Orange’s hospital hub is a result of the city’s central location, proximity to government hub Santa Ana and early efforts by Walt Disney and Walter Knott and the Sisters of St. Joseph.
UCI Medical Center
The university hospital, the only teaching hospital here, evolved from Orange County General Hospital, a county hospital dating back to the late 1890s.
In the 1960s, the hospital was renamed Orange County Medical Center by the county Board of Supervisors, according to a history of UC Irvine’s medical school by Warren Bostick, the school’s founding dean who died last year.
The name change was a first step in aligning the hospital with UCI’s young medical school.
Rising healthcare costs led the county to sell the hospital to the University of California in 1974 for $5.5 million.
UCI took over the hospital two years later and renamed it UCI Medical Center. OC joined San Diego and Sacramento as counties that sold their public hospitals to the UC system.
The hospital has had ups and downs under UCI, including a 1990s egg swapping scandal at the Center for Reproductive Health fertility clinic and last year’s liver transplant problems.
UCI Medical Center loses bragging rights this year as the county’s largest hospital by revenue to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach (see our hospital list on page 46, story on 53).
That could change. UCI Medical Center is spending some $370 million to put up a hospital building to replace its aging current facility. The effort is the largest expansion under way by local hospitals.
St. Joseph Hospital-Orange
The Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, a Roman Catholic order, moved to Orange in 1922. Archbishop John Joseph Cantwell, the first archbishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles, invited the sisters to move here from Eureka.
The nuns bought 10 acres of land from William Burnham, a banker, to build a hospital. Construction started in 1928. St. Joseph-Orange opened its doors to patients in 1929, a month before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression.
St. Joseph-Orange is in the midst of its own big expansion to meet earthquake standards, keep up with population growth and to cater to patient demand for private rooms. The centerpiece is a 248,000-square-foot, 150-bed patient tower.
Children’s Hospital of Orange County
In 1960, pediatricians and business leaders, including Walt Disney and Walter Knott, formed an executive council to start a children’s hospital.
At the time, kids here in need of care went to small pediatric wards or to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, according to CHOC’s Web site.
The project wouldn’t qualify for government funding unless it was part of a larger hospital complex, according to CHOC spokeswoman Jan Lansing. That led to a long-running alliance with St. Joseph Hospital-Orange.
Sisters of St. Joseph had applied with state officials for a large expansion of St. Joseph. They struck a pact with the executive council to build a separate children’s wing and lease it to CHOC. The hospital opened in 1964.
Chapman Medical Center
Chapman Medical Center is the relative baby of Orange’s hospitals. It opened in 1969.
With 114 beds, it’s also the smallest in the city.
Chapman eventually became part of Tenet Healthcare Corp.’s OC hospital stable, until it and three other local facilities were sold in 2005 for about $70 million to Integrated Healthcare Holdings Inc. of Costa Mesa.
Chapman is looking to grow with homes planned for development in the eastern part of Orange and surrounding areas, according to Doug Norris, chief executive of Chapman Medical Center.
“Chapman recognized that there would be a community need for primary medical services to those community members,” he said.
