After decades of planning, Sharp Chula Vista’s new seven-story next-generation hospital is on track to open this fall.
To date, construction for the 197,000-square-foot facility off Medical Center Drive is about 80 percent complete.
Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center has provided health care to San Diego’s South Bay community for nearly 45 years. The new hospital is expected to accommodate the rapidly growing region by adding 138 private patient rooms, five high-tech surgical suites, a hybrid operating room, a rooftop café with panoramic views, and an area for support services.
“Our hospital is going to expand the services that we provide to the local community,” said Pablo Velez, CEO of Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center. “In addition to that we’re bringing in the latest technology to ensure the highest level of care is provided for each person.”
The hybrid operating room combines the elements of a traditional operation room with a cardiac catheterization lab, eliminating the transfer of patients to various parts of the hospital during surgery.
Additional operating rooms also give physicians the ability to book procedures without delay. The average amount of time it takes the hospital to get a patient transport rolling dropped from an average of 17.76 minutes in 2013 to 2.23 minutes in 2017, according to data provided by Sharp in a March 2018 article in The San Diego Union Tribune.
Velez said the goal of the new hospital is to better serve the community.
“We have seen and continue to see an influx of patients coming here to receive care and right now our wait times are not ideal,” he said. “We are trying to decrease that time for our patients, as well as provide the option for patients to stay here in our community…”
There will also be large patient and family consult rooms on each floor, giving all family members the opportunity to attend caregiver meetings and ask questions regarding care.
The project broke ground in November 2016 and the final structural steel column was placed a year later. To celebrate the milestone, Sharp Chula Vista and Sharp HealthCare Foundation held a topping out ceremony where executives, doctors, employees, community members and donors signed the beam.
Prior to breaking ground on hospital construction, a 718-space parking garage and three additional surface parking lots were built.
At $244 million, this new hospital is Sharp’s single largest investment to date for the binational region, said Chula Vista Sharp spokeswoman Jeanna Vazquez. It’s funded through a combination of philanthropic donations to Sharp HealthCare Foundation, bonds, cash reserves and the Medi-Cal Hospital Fee Program.
Velez said construction of the new hospital would create between 75 and 100 jobs.
Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center is a 343-bed hospital that cares for more than 90,000 patients annually and has one of the busiest emergency departments in San Diego County with more than 70,000 visits in fiscal year 2016.
