Long Beach : Patients Moved Into New Spinal Cord Injury Center

A new spinal cord injury center that had remained vacant for more than a year at the Long Beach Veterans Administration Medical Center received its first contingent of patients this week.

“We’re all ecstatic,” said Gabriel Perez, special assistant to the hospital’s director. “The patients are excited and happy.”

The 120-bed, 140,000-square-foot center, called the Ernest Bors Spinal Cord Injury Center, is the largest facility of its kind on the West Coast and more than twice the size of the medical center’s older spinal cord ward.

Constructed at a cost of $18 million, the new center--featuring electronic doors, soft interior lighting and sophisticated monitoring equipment--was dedicated with great hoopla in October, 1988. Then the money ran out. After discovering a major deficit in their annual health care budget, administrators at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington decided instead to spend the money earmarked to finish the Long Beach project on maintaining basic medical services.

Eventually an emergency allocation by Congress provided $2.4 million to put the finishing touches on the building, which included the installation of a telephone system, nurse-call devices, patient monitoring equipment and television sets. But the work was not completed until the facility had sat vacant and unused for nearly 16 months.

This week, medical center officials transferred about 60 patients into the new building from the cramped older ward nearby. The remaining patients, Perez said, will be transfered within the next three weeks.