UC Davis officials tout $60M Sacramento rehab hospital as educational and medical asset
At a Thursday groundbreaking ceremony, UC Davis Health took a giant step forward on a $60 million hospital that will bring a new level of rehabilitation care to Sacramento-area residents with traumatic brain, burn or orthopedic injuries.
“This is going to be the only freestanding rehabilitation hospital in Sacramento County, and it’s going to be the only one in the entire Northern California region associated with an academic medical center,” said David Lubarsky, chief executive officer of UCD Health. “We’re going to be able to train more rehabilitation specialists than ever before. We’re going to be able to give the highest level of care to so many patients who come to us for both either trauma care because of our Level 1 trauma center or stroke care because we’re a comprehensive stroke center.”
The facility, which is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2023, will be at Broadway and 49th Street. It will be managed and largely funded by Kindred Healthcare, a company that specializes in operating such facilities and partners with more than 300 hospital-based programs around the nation.
Initially, the UC-Kindred partnership raised the ire of physical therapists and other unionized workers at UC Davis Medical Center who said they would be forced to apply for new positions to continue doing the work they loved at the new facility. On Thursday, though, Lubarsky said the issues between union and management had been resolved.
“We’ve worked with all of our unions in our organization to what we believe is a totally satisfactory, collegial and collaborative arrangement where everybody who wants to work in this facility who are currently rehab employees on the rehab floors will have that opportunity,” he said. “Those will continue to be UC Davis employees, so they don’t have to give up their longevity or any of their other union benefits.”
UCD-affiliated physicians and medical school students also will provide care and do research with patients at the hospital.
Russ Bailey, Kindred Rehabilitation’s president, said these kinds of partnerships are his company’s bread and butter, helping them to establish destination centers where individuals with advanced rehabilitation needs can benefit from innovative research and technology.
The UCD Rehabilitation Hospital will start with 40 private rooms but will be licensed to accommodate 52. It will have large therapy gyms, transitional living spaces that simulate residential experiences for patients, a therapeutic courtyard with golf, basketball and other surfaces, a dialysis suite, an imaging suite for radiology and specialty programs in neuro, stroke, brain injury, spinal cord injury and amputation.
The facility will be 55,000 square feet, equivalent to roughly the size of a football field, including the end zones. The hospital is on a site that will become a technology and innovation campus known as Aggie Square, planned by the University of California, Davis, and the city of Sacramento.
This story was originally published July 1, 2021 at 3:29 PM.
