Temecula Hospital Update – March 2009

[paramount]

It’s looking more and more like the planned Temecula hospital will not be built anytime soon if at all. From March 7 NC Times:

TEMECULA —- State officials are still waiting for the Pennsylvania-based company working to build a hospital in Temecula to address problems with the plans that were submitted for review almost a year ago.

The major “sticking point,” as described by the spokesman for the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development last week, is a geotechnical report that details how the design of the hospital will meet the state’s strict seismic building codes.

The state office is in charge of approving the final set of plans, rather than the city, because the construction of a hospital in California requires an extra level of scrutiny.

A spokesman for the state office, Patrick Sullivan, said that when the problems are fixed by Universal Health Services, the parent company of Southwest Healthcare System, building permits will be issued.

Southwest is the company that manages two hospitals in Southwest County: Inland Valley Medical Center in Wildomar and Rancho Springs Medical Center in Murrieta.

A spokesman for Universal Health Services, Teresa Fleege, said the state office is requesting “significant changes” to the plans, explaining the length of time it has taken for the completion of the geotechnical report.

When complete, the Temecula Regional Hospital will be a medical complex that is designed to include a 320-bed hospital facility and a cancer treatment center. It is slated for 35 acres at the northwest corner at the intersection of Temecula Parkway and Margarita Road.

Including Temecula Regional, Sun City’s hospital and the hospital that is under construction in Murrieta, there eventually will be five hospitals in Southwest County.

When all five are up and running, there will be more than 800 hospital beds in the area, bringing Southwest County closer to the state’s average resident-to-hospital ratio of 526 to 1.

The Temecula City Council and their constituents, long frustrated by the lack of a hospital to call its own, have made lowering that ratio a priority.

Sullivan said the size of the Temecula medical complex is one of the factors that has turned a review of the plans into a yearlong process.

In some cases, the state’s review can take up to 18 months. That’s how long it took for the review of the plans for 220-bed Loma Linda University Medical Center-Murrieta, which is being built near the intersection of Clinton Keith Road and Interstate 215.

Fleege said Universal Health Services doesn’t have any problems with the length of the review to date.

“We understand that there is a certain process and constraints with what they need to do,” she said.

Stuart Fisk, an associate planner with the city, said city officials have been told by Universal officials that they are close to getting the building permits from the state office.

After receiving those permits, those same officials have said the company plans to put the complex out to bid, which is a months-long process.

Once the bid is awarded, construction will start. It should take about a year to finish the building, hospital officials have said.

“It’s definitely a live and active project,” Fisk said.

City Councilman Ron Roberts said recently that he’s been getting e-mails from city staff members saying approval is close, but that’s been all the information he’s been able to gin up.

Roberts questioned whether the state’s budget chaos may be holding things up in Sacramento, but Sullivan said that’s not the case.

“It’s had no impact on our business,” the spokesman said.

Others have speculated that the delay in approval can be traced to the credit crunch or the problems Southwest faced when it tried to open a new emergency room and women’s center at Murrieta’s Rancho Springs.

The grand opening has been put on hold until Southwest addresses what a state official called a “prolonged history of noncompliance with applicable statutes and regulations that escalated in 2008 and continues.”

Fleege said Universal Health Services’ plans, to her knowledge, haven’t been altered by the credit crunch, which has made it difficult for some companies to line up funding for big projects.

And she said the problems with the opening of the new emergency room and women’s center are unrelated to the state’s review of hospital construction plans.

“Those are different areas,” she said.

The interest in the Temecula hospital project can be traced, in part, to studies that show that Southwest County will need 1,400 more hospital beds by 2020.

After the project was first brought forward in 2004, approval of the plans on the city’s end was tangled up for years by legal wrangling that saw the city dealing with lawsuits filed by a nurses union and a group concerned about traffic and noise that would be generated by the hospital.

The union sued because the environmental documentation for the hospital project did not address the hospital’s proximity to underground gas tanks near the site.

A judge’s ruling forced the city to address both groups’ concerns in a revised environmental document that showed there would be no danger to hospital employees or patients from the chemical residue from the tanks. The new document also detailed how traffic and noise issues would be handled.

That revised document was approved by the city in February 2008.

[Anonymous]

This thing is taking far too long to build, and the reasons for these delays are ridiculous. However, I don’t interpret the article the same way. Even with the delays, it sounds like it will be built within the next few years.

Also, it would help of the city council would get their priorities straight…

[Anonymous]

This thing is taking far too long to build, and the reasons for these delays are ridiculous. However, I don’t interpret the article the same way. Even with the delays, it sounds like it will be built within the next few years.

Also, it would help of the city council would get their priorities straight…

[Anonymous]

This thing is taking far too long to build, and the reasons for these delays are ridiculous. However, I don’t interpret the article the same way. Even with the delays, it sounds like it will be built within the next few years.

Also, it would help of the city council would get their priorities straight…

[Anonymous]

This thing is taking far too long to build, and the reasons for these delays are ridiculous. However, I don’t interpret the article the same way. Even with the delays, it sounds like it will be built within the next few years.

Also, it would help of the city council would get their priorities straight…

[Anonymous]

This thing is taking far too long to build, and the reasons for these delays are ridiculous. However, I don’t interpret the article the same way. Even with the delays, it sounds like it will be built within the next few years.

Also, it would help of the city council would get their priorities straight…

[UCGal]

OSHPD (Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development) is the governing agency for all things hospital in California. Hospitals (vs medical office buildings) have much stricter codes than other types of construction. Stricter seismic codes… the issues with redundant power… the issues with head walls in the rooms. (The wall with the gases.) Hospitals are not typical construction and the state beauracracy addresses this in permitting them through OSHPD. It’s a different set of requirements/documentation needed.

But like pri-dk, I interpreted the article to say it’s delayed, not killed.

There’s a pretty significant shortage of hospital beds in San Diego county. I would imagine it’s similar in Riverside county. It’s quite a process to build a new hospital from scratch, and get through the OSHPD (pronounce osh-pod) maze.

(Yes, another area I’ve picked up on because my husband had done a lot of hospital architectural jobs.)

[UCGal]

OSHPD (Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development) is the governing agency for all things hospital in California. Hospitals (vs medical office buildings) have much stricter codes than other types of construction. Stricter seismic codes… the issues with redundant power… the issues with head walls in the rooms. (The wall with the gases.) Hospitals are not typical construction and the state beauracracy addresses this in permitting them through OSHPD. It’s a different set of requirements/documentation needed.

But like pri-dk, I interpreted the article to say it’s delayed, not killed.

There’s a pretty significant shortage of hospital beds in San Diego county. I would imagine it’s similar in Riverside county. It’s quite a process to build a new hospital from scratch, and get through the OSHPD (pronounce osh-pod) maze.

(Yes, another area I’ve picked up on because my husband had done a lot of hospital architectural jobs.)

[UCGal]

OSHPD (Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development) is the governing agency for all things hospital in California. Hospitals (vs medical office buildings) have much stricter codes than other types of construction. Stricter seismic codes… the issues with redundant power… the issues with head walls in the rooms. (The wall with the gases.) Hospitals are not typical construction and the state beauracracy addresses this in permitting them through OSHPD. It’s a different set of requirements/documentation needed.

But like pri-dk, I interpreted the article to say it’s delayed, not killed.

There’s a pretty significant shortage of hospital beds in San Diego county. I would imagine it’s similar in Riverside county. It’s quite a process to build a new hospital from scratch, and get through the OSHPD (pronounce osh-pod) maze.

(Yes, another area I’ve picked up on because my husband had done a lot of hospital architectural jobs.)

[UCGal]

OSHPD (Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development) is the governing agency for all things hospital in California. Hospitals (vs medical office buildings) have much stricter codes than other types of construction. Stricter seismic codes… the issues with redundant power… the issues with head walls in the rooms. (The wall with the gases.) Hospitals are not typical construction and the state beauracracy addresses this in permitting them through OSHPD. It’s a different set of requirements/documentation needed.

But like pri-dk, I interpreted the article to say it’s delayed, not killed.

There’s a pretty significant shortage of hospital beds in San Diego county. I would imagine it’s similar in Riverside county. It’s quite a process to build a new hospital from scratch, and get through the OSHPD (pronounce osh-pod) maze.

(Yes, another area I’ve picked up on because my husband had done a lot of hospital architectural jobs.)

[UCGal]

OSHPD (Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development) is the governing agency for all things hospital in California. Hospitals (vs medical office buildings) have much stricter codes than other types of construction. Stricter seismic codes… the issues with redundant power… the issues with head walls in the rooms. (The wall with the gases.) Hospitals are not typical construction and the state beauracracy addresses this in permitting them through OSHPD. It’s a different set of requirements/documentation needed.

But like pri-dk, I interpreted the article to say it’s delayed, not killed.

There’s a pretty significant shortage of hospital beds in San Diego county. I would imagine it’s similar in Riverside county. It’s quite a process to build a new hospital from scratch, and get through the OSHPD (pronounce osh-pod) maze.

(Yes, another area I’ve picked up on because my husband had done a lot of hospital architectural jobs.)

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