Following a ribbon cutting ceremony last November, the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center is ready to take its first patients, starting this weekend. As the Examiner reports, "around 200 patients" will be moved over to the 284-room facility beginning Saturday morning, making a 200-foot journey from Building 5, the current trauma center, to Building 25, the new one.
The process is expected to last from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., with critical care patients and infants being moved first. And just to be clear, this is a pretty major undertaking, with this being San Francisco only Level One trauma center, treating 3,900 trauma patients each year, or an average of 10 new ones a day, and the hospital serving 100,000 patients per year.
All new patients arriving to the ER as of 7 a.m. Saturday will be taken directly to the new ER, while women who are still in labor as of that hour will remain in the old hospital to give birth.
The Zuckerberg-Chans announced their $75 million gift to the hospital last year, which got their name on the thing and which funded equipment and furnishings for the hospital, as well as funding a new ambulatory care center that will go into the original hospital building. The actual construction of the new, $884 million hospital was funded by a voter-approved bond initiative.
As Dr. Chan, who has been a pediatric resident at General, said at the time of the gift, "Through my training at The General, I know firsthand the vital health care and trauma services this hospital provides to anyone who lives, works or travels through San Francisco. Day in and day out, I witness the compassion and dedication of my colleagues as they work tirelessly to deliver the best available care to all of our patients. Mark and I are proud to support such an important public hospital."
The new nine-story building brings the facility's number of emergency beds from 27 to 58, and marks the fruition of a long effort to replace the General's aging trauma center. 90 percent of patient rooms in the new building are private, the facility has the capacity to quadruple the number of emergency beds in the event of a major catastrophe. As we saw last fall, each floor of the new building has its own color theme and is associated with a different SF icon, including the Presidio for the ground floor, Ocean Beach for the second, and the Golden Gate for the seventh.
Funding to retrofit the hospital's current building and other structures on the 24-acre campus is something we're voting on on the June ballot.
Open question: Will we continue to say, "They took him to SF General," or will we start to instead say, "They took him to Zuck."
Previously: First Look Inside The New Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg SF General Hospital