San Diego

An 80-bed psychiatric hospital at UC San Diego that will feature private management and publicly provided care was approved Friday by the University of California Board of Regents. The regents, meeting in San Francisco, approved a 40-year lease of 4 acres of university-owned property to Charter Medical-California, a subsidiary of Charter Medical Corp. of Macon, Ga. The action had been tentatively approved Thursday.

Before the vote, regents apparently satisfied themselves in closed session about the financial status of Charter, a national hospital corporation that operates or has under construction 84 facilities with 7,302 beds for the treatment of psychiatric and addictive disorders. Charter has more than 140 teaching affiliations with major universities in the United States and Europe, including Stanford University.

Charter will pay the $11 million to build and furnish the hospital, while UC regents agreed to fund an adjoining $4.7-million research center to house programs of the department of psychiatry, which will oversee medical care at the hospital. Charter will provide the administrative, nursing and technical staff for operation of the hospital, which is designed to allow better training in modern psychiatry for medical students and alleviate a critical shortage of beds for acutely ill psychiatric patients in San Diego County.