On Sunday, 2,100 doctors, nurses, technicians and managers at UCLA Medical Center will participate in a task of epic proportions: moving to the gleaming new hospital across the street.
Although the distance is short, the details are daunting. The shift to the new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center will require military-style precision. Using 30 ambulances and 80 gurneys, three teams of professionals will transfer 350 patients -- many of them hooked up to monitors and respirators -- at the rate of one every two minutes.
"Patient move day" will cap a months-long process. Getting the hospital ready involved installing 18,000 pieces of furniture, 2,800 computers, 1,700 networked medical devices, 3,100 phones and 580 flat-panel TVs; ordering and stocking fresh gauze, linens and pharmaceuticals for 65 departments; rehearsing rescue-helicopter landings on the two new helipads; and ensuring that every radiologist, pharmacist and surgeon will know how to navigate the building and operate the latest in high-tech equipment from Day 1.
The long-awaited move to what UCLA officials describe as the nation's most up-to-date hospital has been eight years in the planning.
The 1-million-square-foot building, which visitors have likened to a concert hall or museum, was designed by C.C. "Didi" Pei and his firm, Pei Partnership of New York, with guidance from his father, architect I.M. Pei. It replaces the 53-year-old center that was heavily damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
After it is "decommissioned" as a hospital, that structure will continue to house the David Geffen School of Medicine, the UCLA School of Dentistry and the UCLA School of Public Health.
The new hospital, clad in Italian travertine from a quarry owned by a former UCLA cancer patient, features 520 large patient rooms -- all of them private -- with expansive views and day beds for family members. It has wireless Internet access, outdoor play areas for children and operating rooms with state of the art video equipment.
"This facility is historic," said David T. Feinberg, chief executive of the UCLA hospital system. "We have really created a place of healing."
Although it's world renowned for surgical breakthroughs and caring for acutely ill patients, the UCLA Medical Center has been the subject of scandals in recent years: the possibly illegal sale of hundreds of donated cadavers, employee snooping into celebrities' medical records and liver transplants for four Japanese patients later shown to have ties to organized crime.
