Why Now?
Stanford Hospital and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital must renew and build facilities, which are the foundation of our community’s healthcare, in order to comply with new seismic safety standards and to accommodate advances in modern medicine.
Senate Bill 1953, passed after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, requires all California hospitals to complete seismic upgrades by 2013 or risk being shut down. Earthquake safety, however, is just one factor driving the project forward. Built during the Eisenhower era, Stanford Hospital needs to be rebuilt in order to accommodate modern healthcare practices, such as the new standard of family-centered care, which provides the space for patients to be with their families during recovery, and single-patient rooms, which improve infection control and patient privacy.
Additionally, the hospitals simply are no longer large enough to accommodate the community’s demand for healthcare. Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, which cares for some of the most critically ill children in the world, is at maximum capacity and must expand in order to accommodate more patient rooms that enable enhanced family-centered care and new diagnostic and treatment rooms. Over the past few years, both facilities have had to turn away hundreds of patients and refer them to other hospitals because of a lack of patient beds. The ER, which serves both hospitals, is undersized and needs to be replaced. As the only Level 1 trauma center on the Peninsula, it is critical that the Stanford Medical Center modernize and rebuild its facilities in order to provide the best quality of care for the community now and in the future.