SANTA MONICA : Quake-Torn Hospital Gets $10-Million Grant

The W. M. Keck Foundation has donated $10 million in grant money to help redesign St. Johns Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, where inpatient services have been halted since the facility was severely damaged in the January earthquake.

For the past seven months, the 501-bed facility offered outpatient care while the hospital’s Main and South wings are being repaired. Those wings are scheduled to reopen Oct. 3, with 233 beds. The North Wing, the hospital’s most severely damaged, was razed.

The Keck Foundation gift, the largest ever recommended by the Foundation’s Southern California Grant Program Committee, is earmarked for architectural engineering and strategic planning studies needed to build a “modern health campus of the 21st Century,” according to Sister Marie Madeleine Shonka, hospital president and chief operating officer.

What that new health care facility will look like--and what functions it will serve--are still undefined, according to Robert O. Klein, executive director of St. Johns Hospital and Health Center Foundation, the fund-raising arm of the hospital.

The grant, which cannot be used for repairs to the old facility, also will help preserve existing research and technological development at the hospital.