Construction begins on 14-story tower rising at Sacramento’s UC Davis Medical Center
To make way for a new hospital tower at UC Davis Medical Center, construction crews started work Monday on demolishing temporary office structures on the site that the new building will occupy.
UC Davis Health leaders say the $3.75 billion California Tower project will create hundreds of new construction jobs in the building phase but will expand demand for health care workers in the long term with thousands of new positions.
“This project will further harness the advantage of UC Davis Medical Center being one of Sacramento County’s largest employers to increase community wealth-building and strengthen our surrounding neighborhoods,” said Brad Simmons, chief administrator of UC Davis Medical Center. “This project will help improve health outcomes for area residents and ensure a robust health care safety net for historically marginalized populations, especially when it comes to providing specialty care hospital services.”
The construction project received approval from the University of California Board of Regents in January, and the new structure will replace sections of the hospital that will not meet new seismic mandates set to go into effect in 2030. The medical center is based at 2315 Stockton Blvd. in Sacramento.
Leaders of UC Davis Health said Monday that the new California Tower will be the region’s most advanced hospital tower when it opens in 2030.
“This project incorporates lessons from the pandemic and those lessons will help us to deliver superior care for Northern Californians for the next 50 years,” said David Lubarsky, CEO of UC Davis Health. “The California Tower will triple our ICU capability, making half of our patient rooms ICU-ready. This investment will be a cornerstone in the critical care we provide our patients and the region moving forward.”
The California Tower will rise 14 stories and will have a five-story pavilion that connects it to the existing medical center. The new structures, which will total roughly 1 million square feet of space, will include operating rooms, an imaging center, an expanded pharmacy, additional burn care units, and about 400 single-patient rooms.
When this work is completed, the medical center will offer 675-700 inpatient beds, up from 646 now. Hospital personnel will be able to convert more than 250 rooms in the new tower intensive-care-unit rooms with air isolation to accommodate patients of any level of hospitalization.
“As the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, embracing the unexpected is a common theme in medicine,” said Lubarsky. “Having the adaptability of patient rooms to meet a critical care surge means these new facilities will be positioned to meet the region’s needs for the next 50 years.”
The Sacramento hospital complex already has two existing towers, University and Davis, and has been providing health care services to Sacramento-area residents for more than 150 years.
This story was originally published May 10, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
