Steve Julian
June 30, 2008
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UCLA Medical Center moved across the street yesterday. It's now called the Reagan UCLA Medical Center and it's in a building designed by famed architect I.M. Pei and his son. The building is opening after years of delays and a rising budget, which grew by more than $200 million. UCLA officials began planning the new building after the old site was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. KPCC Morning Edition host Steve Julian spoke with Dr. David Feinberg, chief executive of the UCLA Hospital System.
Dr. David Feinberg: We probably spent five to six years planning for yesterday. We had 65 people full-time on our transition team for the last five or six years. We moved with some outside move consultants that were fantastic, and we planned, and planned, and planned, and did mock moves, and all that planning and all that energy and people. We had about 2100 people there yesterday to move about 360 patients. It went flawlessly, and we got the last patient in three hours ahead of schedule.
Steve Julian: What kind of patients are these, and how do you move over 300 flawlessly?
Feinberg: Well, they're all types of patients. We moved moms that were in labor. We moved a mom and a baby that– a mom that had just delivered her baby. We moved a gentleman who had just had a double lung transplant. We moved critically ill children, adults, seniors.
Most of the patients– we had tried to decrease our census, 'cause we run much higher than about 360, over the past week, by not having elected surgery and not accepting transfers from other hospitals. So that helped us get the numbers low down.
The other thing is we know how to take care of the sickest of the sick and how to move people, because when they're in our old hospital, or now in our new hospital, we need to move people down for X-ray, or down for surgery, or what have you, so we know how to do that. The challenge was doing that every two minutes with this kind of volume of patients.
Julian: Were they driven?
Feinberg: Yes.
Julian: Were they just taken by gurney? How did this work?
Feinberg: No. We had– we closed off the south part of campus and Westwood Boulevard to car traffic, air traffic, and pedestrian traffic. We had 30 ambulances and two separate teams, a blue and yellow team, that moved and never crossed paths.
Then we had a red, critical team, that moved people in critical care unit mobile units. So we took all of our neonates, our little babies that were in the intensive care unit, because their bassinets don't fit in regular ambulances, in these larger trucks. And probably about 20 or so of our sickest adults also went in those.
Julian: Dr. David Feinberg, what does this new hospital have that the other one lacked?
Feinberg: Oh, this new hospital is the most state of the art hospital, we think in the world. It's all 520 single rooms, designed by world class architect I. M. Pei. It's got magnificent windows and views. There's a whole section in every room for family members, with a pullout bed, private bathroom, a curtain so that if we're doing a procedure on your loved one, you don't have to leave the room.
We don't have any more visiting hours. It's 24 hour family access. We don't even have meal service at noon where they walk around and hand you a tray. It's on demand, room style, hotel style room service, so you order what you want, when you want.
Julian: Dr. David Feinberg is chief executive of the UCLA Hospital System. Congrats, and thanks very much.
Feinberg: Thank you so much for your time.
Courtesy UCLA Health Sciences
