Listen to this article 5 min
It's what Dr. Charlene Blake calls the "Moffitt slalom" — squeezing through the narrow, crammed hallways of Moffitt Hospital on the Parnassus Heights campus of the University of California, San Francisco.
It's a route medical personnel must negotiate with a patient on a gurney, life-sustaining fluids and mechanical equipment in tow, following heart surgery or other equally tricky operations. Then cardiothoracic anesthesiologist Blake and her team must angle bed, patient, fluids, equipment and themselves onto an elevator, making sure they're on the same side as the elevator buttons.
"That is not fun," Blake said. "It doesn't feel good, but we do it."
Come 2030 — still six years away — Blake and other medical personnel can kiss the slalom goodbye. That's when UCSF Health expects to open the $4.3 billion, 900,000-square-foot, 15-story Helen Diller Hospital on the Parnassus campus. It will largely replace Moffitt and Long Hospital for treating some of the most complex intensive care cases.
The hospital, which will be the largest in San Francisco, was to celebrate a groundbreaking Saturday. It represents the largest outlay for a single capital expenditure in the history of the University of California system, said UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood.
When operational, the 324-bed hospital will increase the campus' capacity to 682 beds, add 21 operating rooms and boost the number of emergency care beds by 31. Almost half of the building is geared toward intensive care, such as neurosurgery, heart and lung care and kidney transplants.
The project means UCSF Health, which because of space constraints turned away 5,000 requests last year from less-equipped hospitals throughout California to take critical-care patients, will have capacity to take on those sickest-of-the-sick patients.
"There will be (greater) ability for us to take care of the most-complex conditions we see at UCSF Health," said UCSF Health CEO Suresh Gunasekaran. "There isn't going to be a condition a patient has that will be too complex for us to handle."
The project is the latest point in a generational shift in hospital facilities and health care players in the Bay Area, particularly in San Francisco. Among the changes: UCSF's upcoming $100 million acquisition of underperforming St. Francis and St. Mary's hospitals in San Francisco from Dignity Health — aimed at boosting UCSF Health's community care beds and services — the 2019 opening of Sutter Health's $2.1 billion, 274-bed, 1 millions-square-foot California Pacific Medical Center Van Ness and a planned $442 million, five-story medical building expanding Sutter's CPMC Mission Bernal hospital campus, which opened in 2018.
What's more, UCSF is undertaking a $1.5 billion expansion of UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland.
Many of the changes are driven by the state's 2030 deadline to seismically upgrade facilities — a mandate some hospitals are struggling to meet. UCSF Health also faces significant capacity issues in its emergency departments, acute care and longer-term complex care cases. At the same time, recruiting and retention of staff and medical students at health care-focused, graduate level-only UCSF is tougher in stretched, outdated facilities.
The 390,300-square-foot Moffitt Hospital building, for example, is 69 years old. The 373,600-square-foot Long Hospital structure next door was built in 1983. Both of those buildings will remain open with reduced capacity and a different lineup of services — reducing from 475 intensive care, acute care and transition care beds to 354 beds, all focused on acute care, for example.
With the Helen Diller Hospital's completion, UCSF Health's Parnassus beds will increase 37% from 499 to 682.
"It is a volatile and challenging time (in health care)," Hawgood said. "But the excitement and the opportunities far outweigh the challenges and concerns."
UCSF, established in 1898 and now with 33,000 employees, including 10,000 at Parnassus, has received more than $600 million from donors to support the hospital, including $500 million from the Helen Diller Foundation for planning, design and construction. The substantial remaining chunks of case will come from hospital operations and lending, said Elizabeth Polek, a project manager for the Parnassus hospital.
Helen Diller Hospital will sit on the site of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital, which moved to the seventh floor of UCSF's Mount Zion complex on Divisadero Street near Geary Boulevard while its clinics moved to UCSF's 150,000-square-foot Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building in Mission Bay.
The life of Helen Diller, who with her husband Sanford built their fortune through multi-family properties owner Prometheus Real Estate Group, was rooted in the sites now central to UCSF and UCSF Health. Helen Diller, who died in January 2015, was born at Mount Zion, before its merger with UCSF, and met her husband at UC Berkeley.
The family's philanthropy was central to the building of the Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Mission Bay campus and has helped UCSF fund faculty awards — money to attract and retain professors — student scholarships and assistance for its medical, nursing, dental and pharmacy schools, and as part of an evergreen endowment.
When Helen and Sanford Diller looked at ways to give back to the community, UCSF was selected as "the institution that could accept and deliver outstanding results on such a very large grant," said Jackie Safier, the Dillers' daughter and the CEO of Prometheus, in an email to the Business Times. "They would have been especially pleased to see that this new hospital will not be just another institutional building but rather a warm, human-healing experience focused on patients and hospital staff."
Resembling a towering pagoda, the new hospital was designed by HDR and Herzog & de Meuron, a Swiss company that made the structure its first health care project in the United States. The contractor is HBW, a joint venture of Herrero Builders, The Boldt Co. and Webcor.
The 300-square-foot patient rooms — 30% to 40% larger than current rooms at Moffitt and Long hospitals — a sixth floor with a ring of trees, walking paths and a food hall, and an eighth-floor staff terrace are among the elements designed to create a "healing habitat," project manager Polek said. The large windows in patient rooms, too, are designed to take advantage of expansive views into Golden Gate Park and the Mount Sutro Forest.
"It's not your typical hospital," Polek said. "Today, when you walk in, you feel like you're caught in a concrete tower."
The larger spaces, clumped in neighborhoods so doctors, nurses and other medical personnel aren't far from patients and their families, are uplifting for personnel that will work at the site every day, said Blake, the anesthesiologist and "Moffitt slalom" gold medalist.
"It lifts your morale," she said. "You feel free."
The Helen Diller Hospital is the jewel of what UCSF officials say is a critical remake of UCSF's Parnassus Heights campus — the largest and oldest of the university's sites in the Bay Area. On the other western end of the campus opposite the hospital, UCSF has started construction of an $843 million, 323,000-square-foot research building on the site of UCSF's first hospital, UC Hall, a 100-year-old building that was razed and temporarily housed a giant dirt pile.
The research building, whose tenants will include the Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine and the Bakar ImmunoX institute studying the immune system, is expected to be completed in 2027.
UCSF commissioned a 30-year master plan in 2018, the large first phase of which includes the hospital, research building and smaller projects and is priced at about $6 billion.
"Parnassus was built iteratively. There was no master plan," Hawgood said, contrasting it to the planned Mission Bay campus that opened about 20 years ago. "Parnassus has a fortress feel. A lot happens (there) that the public has never seen."
UCSF is executing a "Park to Peak" program aimed at guiding pedestrians along a beautified stretch from nearby Golden Gate Park, up the hill to the campus and higher up to Mount Sutro. It has committed to planting two trees, for example, for every tree removed for the hospital project.
UCSF's 30-year master plan also calls for tearing down other buildings and constructing new ones, including a new home for its School of Dentistry and new housing.
Plans for the Parnassus site have drawn criticism over the years from some residents in the nearby Inner Sunset, Parnassus Heights and Cole Valley neighborhoods, but UCSF and the city negotiated a community benefits plan in 2021 that, among other things, includes more than 1,700 housing units aimed at students and staff.
Some 40% of those units will be affordable for people making less than 120% of area median income by 2050.