SAN FRANCISCO: May Build New Health Facility

      City health commissioners have "dusted off a 5-year-old proposal to build a $62 million facility to house research labs and daytime medical clinics" for San Francisco General Hospital and the University of California-San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The proposal is a reworking of a 1993 plan that would have built a six-story, $100 million structure next to the current San Francisco General Emergency Department to entice UCSF to locate its expanded research facilities in San Francisco. The building "was to have been financed and built by private developers and leased to UCSF and the city." In the interim, however, UCSF has decided to stay in the city and build a "second campus" in Mission Bay. As a result, the Chronicle reports, "the revived design is intended to keep the hospital's existing research staff happy and to solve the earthquake retrofit problems looming over the facility." Dr. Mitch Katz, director of the city's Department of Public Health, said, "San Francisco General Hospital is viewed as one of the best public hospitals in the United States, but many of our buildings no longer fulfill modern standards for clinical and research facilities."

Build It And They Will Come
      The new four-story, 160,000 square-foot building will be built at a current parking lot site at San Francisco General near the "hospital curve" of Highway 101. The top two floors "would be used by UCSF researchers who also practice medicine at the hospital. The lower two floors and the basement would house the medical clinics" that are currently in "buildings that will not meet earthquake safety standards after 2007." Officials expect that it will take four years to secure the $62 million the facility will cost, acquire regulatory approval and complete construction (Russell, 4/23).