Silicon Valley Foundation Selects Partner for Proposed Children’s Hospital

The Silicon Valley Children's Hospital Foundation, which plans to build a 50-bed children's facility in San Jose in the next two years, has selected Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital as a partner, the San Jose Mercury News reports. Packard will help the foundation to build the new children's facility within an unnamed adult hospital. The foundation has not selected the host hospital and must raise millions of dollars to build the facility, and "fundraising will begin in earnest now that the partnership has been established," Dr. Chris Whitney, a member of the foundation's medical advisory board, said. The foundation also plans to build a separate children's hospital within seven years (Feder, San Jose Mercury News, 2/6). The plan would cost about $20 million (California Healthline, 9/28/01). However, local hospital executives "remain skeptical" about the need for a separate children's hospital in San Jose. Palo Alto, Oakland and San Francisco each have a "top-flight" children's facility "within an hour's drive," they said. Robert Sillen, executive director of the Santa Clara Valley Health and Hospital System, which operates Valley Medical Center, said, "What's driving [the plans for new children's hospital] is a combination of personal emotion, civic pride and vested competitive financial interest. ... But I'm not at all sure that this kind of expenditure is really going to be in the community's best interest" (San Jose Mercury News, 2/6). In 1995, a group of local physicians proposed a plan to build a $60 million children's hospital in San Jose, but the proposal failed (California Healthline, 9/28/01).