UCSD Renews Plan for New Hospital on College Campus

A plan to build a 120-bed hospital on the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla is expected to be discussed today by a committee of the University of California Board of Regents.

The medical and surgical facility, which would not be built before the early 1990s, is described as a “satellite” of UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest. It would be on 40 acres east of Interstate 5, across the freeway from the VA Medical Center.

UCSD officials hope the proposed $57.7-million hospital would ease overcrowding at UCSD Medical Center, assure the medical center’s financial health by attracting more affluent patients, and improve clinical training of doctors at the university.

“We need to decompress our facilities in Hillcrest because we don’t have adequate space for our teaching program and patient care services at that site,” Dr. Ruth Covell, an associate dean of the School of Medicine, said Wednesday.

The idea of such a hospital has been around for two decades and was in the original plans for the medical school in the mid-1960s. After being put aside in the 1970s, it resurfaced in the university’s long-range development plan, approved by the regents in 1982.

As proposed, the hospital and outpatient facility would operate under a common license and management with UCSD Medical Center. The 120 licensed beds would be transferred to the new hospital, making it possible to limit rooms in the medical center to just one or two beds.

All rooms in the new hospital would be single occupancy.

The university’s proposal to the regents contends that the new facility would help achieve these objectives:

- Make it easier for on-campus faculty and fellows to see patients and participate in clinical research.

- Achieve a better balance of patients “in terms of disease spectrum and socioeconomic characteristics.”

- Attract and retain clinical faculty members with patients in North County and “major faculty revenue generators.”

- Provide services convenient to the burgeoning North City and North County population and attract that area’s growing elderly population.

- Allow more space for renovations at the Hillcrest facility, where there would be an emphasis on Medi-Cal and Medicare patients and on techniques and methods of therapy that are economically feasible only in large institutions.

The proposal states that “the overall increase in fuller-paying patients would favorably stabilize the financial condition of UCSD Medical Center, thereby assuring that UCSD’s commitment to the low-income (population) would not decrease.”

The proposal notes that UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest was designed originally as a county hospital for indigent patients. While it remains the “hospital of last resort” for the poor and indigent in San Diego and Imperial counties, it has also evolved into the city’s only hospital committed to education and research as well as patient care, and into a regional center for a wide range of highly specialized services.

Although the hospital has attempted to adapt to the growing competitive pressures among hospitals, the proposal notes, its flexibility has been constrained by “the undersized and antiquated condition of UCSD Medical Center’s basic inpatient facility and the need for better access to the rapidly growing population in the North City/County areas and to private-pay patients.”

For example, the 437-bed facility has only 778 square feet per bed--compared to the general community hospital standard of 1,000 square feet per bed and the university teaching hospital standard of nearly 1,500 square feet per bed, the report states. University officials say only 403 of the 437 licensed beds can be filled because of problems of mixing men and women in the same rooms and the danger of spreading infectious diseases.

“Lack of space is a constant problem, limiting program growth and development, compromising the environment of patient care and inhibiting teacher-student interaction,” the report to the regents says.

The proposal for the new facility, which UCSD officials on Wednesday stressed is preliminary, was scheduled for discussion by the Board of Regents’ committee on hospital governance. No action has been requested.

Leslie Franz, a spokeswoman for the School of Medicine, emphasized that there will be full public discussion of the proposal before it is presented to the regents for any formal action or approval.