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John Muir to Raise $10M-plus for Concord Projects
East Bay Business Times
by Marie-Anne Hogarth
July 20, 2007
John Muir Health's fundraising arm kicked off the capital campaign this week for its $170 million expansion of the system's Concord hospital campus, and announced it has exceeded its initial $20 million fundraising goal for some $630 million in construction projects at the Walnut Creek campus. "Because of the backing we've had so far, we've raised $23 million and I've raised the goal to $40 million," said Guy Henshaw, managing director of Henshaw/Vierra Management Counsel LLC and chair of the capital campaign for John Muir Health Foundation. "We've hired consultants to look at Concord and we'll determine in the next few weeks how much to raise there. It will be north of $10 million."
The city of Concord approved earlier this month building a 174,000-square-foot patient-care tower and other projects. Construction should start before the end of the year, pending state approval, and be complete by 2010.
The tower would have six floors - including one below ground that would house a new expanded emergency department with a computer-aided tomography scanner. The emergency room would expand from 22 to 32 bays, with four imaging rooms. "The current ER was built in the early '70s to accommodate 25,000 patients," said Tom Harlan, president and chief administrative officer for John Muir Concord. "This ER will provide that capacity and is designed to improve throughput so patient stays will be shorter."
Some 48,000 patients visited John Muir Concord's emergency department last year.
The next three stories will house a John Muir cardiovascular institute, with four cardiac catherization labs, a dozen private cardiovascular ICU beds and 49 private telemetry beds. "All private rooms will be very large to accommodate not only patients and staff and equipment but families," Harlan said. "Having all private rooms is critical from a hospital construction standpoint in this day age, in terms of, No. 1, quality and, No. 2, efficiency."
Overall, the percentage of private bedrooms in the hospital will increase from 29 to 63 by 2010 as a result of the project, with a goal of eventually making 80 percent of rooms private.
The top two floors of the patient care tower will remain vacant for now, but John Muir wants to add beds as needed. In a different building, "B-Tower," John Muir has remodeled medical-surgical areas, and will renovate the critical care unit there after 2010. Separately, Danville developer, TSM Investment Corp., and cardiovascular physicians are building a 40,000-square-foot medical office building adjacent to the patient tower. Other hospital plans include building a lab, adding a helicopter pad and another medical office building, but these are also not part of the $170 million price tag. John Muir is funding the greatest portion of the construction at Concord through the system's reserves.
"The health care world has become so complicated and massive that a lot of the services in Alameda and Contra Costa are provided by very large organizations," Henshaw said. "John Muir is still a regional community center operation and to do that we have to work harder and run faster."
The campaign kicked off with a dinner July 19 at the Concord campus honoring Gerard FitzPatrick, chairman of FitzPatrick Chevrolet Buick Hummer, founded in 1948. He is past president of the Concord Chamber of Commerce and a former John Muir trustee.
In the Walnut Creek campaign, donations from three sources represent about half of the $23 million contributed to date.
These include $9.5 million from the Thomas J. Long Foundation, $2.5 million from Theresa M. Caygill and $2.5 million from John Muir Medical Center Auxiliary.
The Concord hospital is the former public district hospital, Mt. Diablo Medical Center, which merged in 1997 with the private, nonprofit John Muir Medical Center.
(Posted July 25, 2007)