UCSF Health Collaborates with City and Local Hospitals to Increase Inpatient Capacity

As part of its broader COVID-19 response, UCSF Health is working with hospitals across the City of San Francisco to expand inpatient and critical care capacity to meet the anticipated surge in demand due to the novel coronavirus disease.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed on March 25 announced the opening of a new COVID-19 facility at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital to help the city prepare for a surge in patients. The facility will include 40 beds on a dedicated floor at Saint Francis, with an additional eight-bed intensive care unit. The first 10 beds will be available the first week in April.

The facility is the product of a collaboration across San Francisco hospitals – led by the Hospital Council, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, Dignity Health and UCSF Health – that aims to address the epidemic on a united front.

In addition to providing medical staff, UCSF Health is contributing $1 million to help build out the unit and providing nursing leadership to replicate the staffing model used in the UCSF COVID-19 unit at Parnassus Heights. UCSF School of Pharmacy is also contributing clinical pharmacy expertise. Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health and Chinese Hospital will supplement physician staffing.

The collaboration also includes a new predictive modeling system, developed in partnership with UC Berkeley researchers, in which all city hospitals will collectively track the numbers and outcomes of COVID-19 patients in hospitals citywide.

The city estimates that if the current shelter-in-place efforts are not successful, San Francisco will need significant numbers of additional beds to meet the needs of a surge in the coming weeks. This effort is one of several steps that San Francisco hospitals are taking to help meet that demand.