Newsbreak
New Mission Bay medical center presents new opportunities at UCSF
By Lisa Cisneros
Opening UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay near UCSF’s life sciences campus promises to transform patient care, teaching and research by creating new opportunities throughout the University.
For the city and county of San Francisco, the new medical center complex will be the first hospital in 30 years built from the ground up. It will house San Francisco’s only emergency room designed for children.
With a budget of $1.686 billion for the first phase, the children’s, women’s and cancer hospital complex at Mission Bay is one of the largest building projects in the western United States. The further development of the UCSF Mission Bay campus also will provide substantial benefits to the local economy, creating new jobs for health care professionals and staff alike.
Bruce Spaulding, senior vice chancellor of University Advancement and Planning, says that building the new medical center at Mission Bay in the southeast sector of San Francisco is key to contributing to the quality of life and health of the city.
Spaulding first eyed Mission Bay as the future home of the medical center back in the 1990s, and led a thorough review of long-range development options in an extensive and inclusive exercise that involved input from many faculty, staff, community members and civic leaders. Spaulding also worked behind the scenes to gain approval by the Regents for the massive project in September.
“The idea that we are building a new hospital in the one area in San Francisco where there’s major new housing and development, while maintaining our presence at Parnassus Heights in the western part of the city, is very gratifying,” Spaulding says.
Samuel Hawgood, interim dean of the UCSF School of Medicine, who has been involved in the planning process for years, agrees.
“The new medical center at Mission Bay will mean that our neighbors will have access to a world-class hospital right in their own backyard,” he says. “In addition, UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay will continue to be a valuable regional resource allowing us to serve more patients throughout Northern California and beyond.”
Importantly, the new medical center at Mission Bay will provide patients, faculty and staff with facilities that are equal to the care that UCSF has provided for the past 100 years and will be a magnet to recruit new faculty, Hawgood continues.
“There is a lot of excitement about opening a new hospital right next to a brand-new research campus,” Hawgood says. “We’ve already seen that in the last couple of years, we’ve been able to attract people away from other leading institutions around the country to come to UCSF. We now will have the ability to grow and attract the very best faculty in the country.”
The expansion of UCSF clinical facilities to Mission Bay will lead to new collaborations among clinicians and scientists, including Linda Guidice, left, chair of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, and Susan Fisher, professor in the Department of Cell and Tissue Biology. Photo by Dale Higgins
Realizing UCSF's Vision
For UCSF, the opportunity to expand patient care services to Mission Bay represents a significant step in realizing the vision outlined in the UCSF Strategic Plan. That plan, unveiled in June 2007, specifically calls on the clinical enterprise to achieve three major goals: provide high-quality, patient-centered care leading to optimal outcomes and patient satisfaction, improve access to care, and set the standard for patient safety.
By operating a medical center at Mission Bay, UCSF will be able to achieve all three goals and, in the process, transform academic medicine in part by:
- Translating basic science into clinical practice more rapidly through increased collaboration among scientists and clinicians
- Accelerating development of new diagnostic and treatment approaches for children, women and cancer patients
- Training the next generation of health care practitioners using new tools and technology in facilities that foster teaching and learning
Once the new hospital complex is completed, UCSF will operate two comprehensive academic medical centers at Mission Bay and Parnassus Heights. Mount Zion will be converted to an outpatient center, including a new home for integrative medicine.
“We will be able to relieve some of the congestion from Parnassus and make it much more hospitable for patients, faculty and staff,” Hawgood says. “We also will be able to revitalize the Mount Zion campus and make it a world-class destination site for ambulatory care. I think the vision and the opportunities created at Parnassus and Mount Zion are every bit as great and exciting as they are for Mission Bay.”
In fact, the expansion of clinical services at Mission Bay and continued investment at Parnassus Heights and Mount Zion represent an extraordinary opportunity to rethink, revise and refresh UCSF’s academic, research and patient care programs across all three sites, campus leaders say.
“On Parnassus, patient care and discovery have walked hand in hand since the 1950s,” says Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, dean of the UCSF School of Pharmacy. “They’ve proved terrific partners. But the Parnassus model was not preplanned; it evolved. We have the chance to now plan our research and patient care facilities at Mission Bay so that both move forward together from the outset. And now with new science and new patient care plans for Parnassus, it will take an evolutionary leap forward.”
Stem cell science, for example, is expected to advance at a research center being planned for the UCSF Institute for Regeneration Medicine (IRM) on the Parnassus campus. The IRM building will house wet-lab space for 25 principal investigators, who will work to gain a better understanding of how human stem cells change from their undifferentiated state to become specialized tissues.
This multidisciplinary team of stem cell scientists will capitalize on UCSF’s collaborative culture by promoting intellectual synergies and creating a nexus for a broad-spectrum research program that will continue to extend throughout the University. And insights gained at the IRM building will shape and direct potential therapies, which will be tested and refined in clinical trials at both the Mission Bay and Parnassus hospitals.
Among the changes at Mount Zion is the recent groundbreaking of a 48,000-gross-square-foot medical office building that will house the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, where practitioners combine both conventional and alternative healing systems to address the biological, psychological, social and spiritual aspects of health and illness. The new medical building also will house clinics, offices and support space for UCSF Medical Center.
Fostering innovation and collaboration across UCSF sites and disciplines is also part of the UCSF Strategic Plan and the schools’ plans for the future.
“One of the UCSF School of Pharmacy’s strategic plan objectives is to lead new pharmacy programs that cut across all of the work we do at UCSF, from the lab to the clinic to the halls of government, where we can influence policy,” Koda-Kimble says. “The facility and program plans for the Mission Bay and Parnassus campuses, as well as the Mount Zion campus, support our approach very well.”
Expanding Access
The development of Mission Bay also means growth to programs on Parnassus and Mount Zion.
“Our mission at UCSF is advancing health worldwide and the UCSF Medical Center has a strong record of doing just that – comprehensively in children’s health, women’s health, cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurosciences, organ transplantation and more,” says Mark Laret, chief executive officer of UCSF Medical Center. “This Mission Bay hospital project will allow us to do even more.”
Indeed, moving children’s, women’s and cancer services to UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay frees up space at Parnassus Heights and Mount Zion for other programs, says Jay Harris, director of strategic development at UCSF Medical Center.
About 125 to 150 beds will be available to expand adult care services at Moffitt/Long Hospital on Parnassus, Harris says, providing an opportunity to boost services that are most in demand, such as neurosurgery, heart and vascular medicine, orthopedics and transplant surgery.
This is good news for patients and the 12,000 physicians from throughout Northern California who refer patients every year to UCSF for complex care. Being able to grow also pleases UCSF faculty physicians, who are excited and eager about the opportunity to treat more patients who otherwise would be turned away or placed on waiting lists for lack of beds or operating room time.
“I think one of the most attractive aspects of the move to Mission Bay is the fact that it will free up tremendously important space here at Parnassus for us to grow programs that could have grown over the past several years, but were hampered by the lack of space,” says Mitchel Berger, professor and chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery and director of the brain tumor surgery program.
“Therefore, we are very excited about the move, not only for obvious reasons – including our own pediatric neurosurgery program, which will flourish in this new environment – but also that it will create space for us to get in more patients in a timely fashion and to hire more faculty to take care of those patients,” Berger says.
Nancy Ascher, professor and chair of the Department of Surgery, agrees. “UCSF has premier programs in transplantation of virtually all the solid organs,” she says. “Our expert teams of specialists provide outstanding patient care. They offer even the most seriously ill patients the best chance of successful outcomes, and ensure patients’ lives after transplant are as normal as possible.
“There is increasing demand for our surgical services for complex procedures, such as esophageal resection, complex vascular disease and replacement for patients with end-stage organ disease,” Ascher explains. “The development of Mission Bay will allow the growth these services require. UCSF’s incredible success in the past in areas such as solid organ transplant and endovascular stenting has been heavily dependent on our ability to grow.”
Educating Future Practitioners
Ensuring UCSF’s ability to flourish is also important to fulfilling the academic mission of training future doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists and scientists.
“Education has been considered every step along the way in the new medical center at Mission Bay, where informatics, new technology and small-group assembly spaces will provide an environment where education can be facilitated,” Hawgood notes.
The dental school students will benefit from a brand-new training ground at Mission Bay, says M. Anthony Pogrel, professor and chair of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.
“The UCSF School of Dentistry will be seamlessly integrated into the Mission Bay medical center in a similar way as it is on the Parnassus campus,” he says. “The major area of activity within the initial Mission Bay medical facility will be pediatric dentistry, which will have a fully operational pediatric dental clinic within the pediatric ambulatory care building.”
Pogrel adds that the UCSF Center for Craniofacial Anomalies will move its activities completely from Parnassus to the Mission Bay facility under the directorship of Karin Vargervik. The Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and the UCSF Center for Craniofacial Anomalies will function in the shared outpatient surgical space in the ambulatory care building at Mission Bay.
“This will enhance the teamwork, communication and collaboration of this multidisciplinary clinic, which includes plastic surgeons, oral and maxillofacial surgeons, orthodontists, genetic counselors, speech pathologists, and social workers,” Pogrel explains.
Kathleen Dracup, dean of the UCSF School of Nursing, sees a bright future ahead for nursing education. “The new medical center at Mission Bay will provide our nursing students with a state-of-the-art clinical site in which they will learn the latest techniques in the care of children, women and patients with cancer,” she says. “It will also provide faculty members in the School of Nursing new opportunities to conduct translational research with these same populations.”
That UCSF plans to continue investing in the Parnassus campus is “important for the four schools that are all housed there,” Dracup adds. “As the Parnassus campus evolves, nursing students will have new opportunities to learn with their colleagues in interdisciplinary groups. The responsibility of nurses to provide safe, high-quality care to their patients has never been greater.”
Adds Koda-Kimble, “The physical changes underway at both sites send an important signal to both our health care and science students. They signal that science and care work best together. This, I hope, will entice our science students to seek clinical grounding and our clinical students to seek research experience.”