University of California, Irvine’s $556 million University Hospital,the largest in a wave of local hospital expansions,is readying for its first patients.
Officials are hopeful that the hospital, an expansion of UCI Medical Center in Orange, will open by the end of the week, spokesman John Murray said.
University Hospital’s $393 million first phase includes a seven-story building, 482,428 square feet of space, 236 beds,a majority of which are in private rooms,and 15 operating rooms.
The hospital will serve as a teaching and research center for UC Irvine.
Started in 2005, the hospital is partly a response to California’s seismic safety law passed after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. By 2030, all acute-care hospitals must be able to keep operating after a major quake.
“A hospital has to remain standing so it can continue to provide services,” Murray said.
Other factors also played into the expansion.
“We also knew here at UC Irvine that if we wanted to continue providing the kind of healthcare (we’d like) and meet our other missions, we’d need a new facility,” Murray said.
The hospital’s second phase is set to add four operating rooms, 45 patient beds, 21 limited-stay beds and a radiology department. That phase, which will cost $163 million, is scheduled to be done in late 2011.
After the second phase is built out, University Hospital will have 424 beds. That number includes the hospital’s neuropsychiatric operation and maternity ward, which are remaining in a hospital tower that opened in the early 1980s on the hospital’s campus.
UCI plans to raze a pair of structures: a building from the 1960s that served as the main hospital when the university bought it from the county in 1976, as well as the original hospital, which opened in 1914.
Retrofitting those buildings to meet the earthquake standards would be “prohibitively expensive,” Murray said.
The land housing the older buildings will be left as open space.
University Hospital’s other features include a neonatal intensive care unit with 30 beds and room for more, a minimally invasive surgical center, as well as rooms that provide doctors and nurses private areas to discuss patients’ conditions,a nod to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal patient privacy law.
“We built a lot of space like that to get doctors off the floor when they are talking about patients,” Murray said.
Colorado-based Hensel Phelps Construction Co. built the hospital. St. Louis-based HOK Group Inc. was the architect.
UCI got most of the University Hospital funding from a state bond designed to help University of California hospitals pay for their seismic upgrades.
The hospital also has raised about $33 million from donations, Murray said, including a major donation from the Chao family of Corona-based Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc. fame. The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCI is named after Allen Chao, Watson’s founder who lives in Anaheim Hills, and his family.
UCI worked closely with the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, which regulates hospitals, during construction.
David Carlisle, OSHPD’s director, “basically said this was a model for how hospitals should be built in the future,” Murray said.
On the inside, UCI sought to make University Hospital a bit more inviting and less “oppressive” than the traditional institutional hospital feeling, Murray said. The hospital’s design incorporates a lot of natural light, interiors are done in soft colors and artwork is prominently displayed.
UCI is opening University Hospital at a time of executive transition. Maureen Zehntner, the current chief executive, is scheduled to step down Friday. The university is searching for her replacement.
Terry Belmont, a former chief executive of Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, is Zehntner’s interim replacement.
