Traffic Alert!
The Lake Chabot Road entrance to the hospital’s parking garage was closed today to accommodate work on the underground utilities. Workers began early this morning to remove the driveway and dig the trench to reach the work areas.
The access to and from Lake Chabot Road from this site will remain closed the entire month of September.
Employees, physicians and visitors may access the garage from the hospital’s main campus driveway, adjacent to the Emergency Department.
Visitors may still park in the parking lots on the hospital campus, or in the parking garage with a pedestrian bridge located on the 5th level. Proceed with caution as more traffic is now directed to the main driveway.
We have Security posted to help ease confusion and direct traffic.
by George Bischalaney, President & CEO, Eden Medical Center
Nearly a year after the California Nurses Association filed a challenge to prevent Sutter Health from rebuilding Eden Medical Center, the petition has been denied. The judgment by Alameda County Superior Court was entered on July 7, 2010, and the Order Denying the Petition is now on the court’s website case # RG09462329. You can also view a PDF version of the judge’s order.
For all of us at Eden Medical Center, and more importantly, residents of Alameda County, this is very good news. We have always believed that this misguided attempt to stop a State-mandated rebuilding project was not based upon merit. Gratefully, the court agreed with our position.
On July 1, 2009, we broke ground to begin the project, just weeks after receiving approval of our Environmental Impact Report from the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Despite the union’s challenge filed last year, work continued without hesitation. As a result, we remain on the very tight schedule to meet the opening date of January 2013. Any delay caused by this action would have put the timely opening, if not the project, in jeopardy.
When completed, the 230,000-square-foot hospital and 80,000-square-foot medical office building will provide assurance to the people of Alameda County that it will not only withstand a significant earthquake, but remain operational to aide victims affected by it.
The entire steel framework has been completed, and work continues to at a rapid pace. Weather permitting through the end of this year, the project team hopes to have the exterior and roofs completed, weather tight before the spring rains, and begin working in earnest on the interior finishes.
Topping Off Ceremony Celebrates the Achievements of the Construction Teams
Workers shake hands at teh top of the structural steel following placement of the signed beam
For the past week, the sun was shining brightly as Eden Medical Center employees, physicians, volunteers, patients and community members stopped at the construction site to sign the celebratory steel beam. The construction teams were on site working in perfect weather to keep the construction project on pace. At the end of each day, many took the opportunity to add their signatures to the crossbeam that would be hoisted to fit in the last spot at the highest structural point of the steel structure.
By Tuesday morning, the rain and wind returned, but that didn’t dampen the spirits of everyone who gathered for to mark the special occasion. About 200 people gathered under cover of the parking garage to congratulate the construction teams, sign the beam and cheer as the beam was lifted into place.
The American flag was paced atop the beam prior to liftoff
As is the tradition in the construction industry, the Topping Off Ceremony marks the moment when the highest structural point in the building construction has been attained. The last steel beam is signed and hoisted into place. An evergreen tree and US flag are placed on the beam to symbolize that the building project has proceeded well, with a clean safety record, and to bring good fortune to the future inhabitants of the building.
Eden Anesthesiologist Dr. Frank Rico, former EMC board member, checks out the signatures after adding his name to the beam
Eden Medical Center CEO George Bischalaney welcomed the crowd and thanked them for supporting the efforts. He stated that this milestone was as significant to the community as it was to the construction teams, as the dream of a new hospital becomes reality. DPR Construction executive George Hurley thanked the steelworkers and every contractor on the job for their great work, and commended Sutter Health Project Director Digby Christian for keeping the project moving forward.
We’ll post more information about the trades and the next steps in the project soon. Let us know if you have questions or comments for any member of the Project Team.
Topping Off Ceremony on April 27
The construction of the new Sutter hospital is quickly reaching another major milestone. On Tuesday, April 27, we will have our Topping Off Ceremony at the site at 10:00 a.m. We invite our employees, physicians, volunteers, neighbors and friends to join us for this special event.
The topping off ceremony is a tradition within the construction industry that marks the moment when the highest structural point in the building construction has been attained. The last steel beam is signed and hoisted into place. An evergreen tree and US flag are placed on the beam to symbolize that the building project has proceeded well and safely, and to bring good fortune to the future inhabitants of the building.
You can also be a part of history in the making!
Join us at one of the dates and times below to add your signature to the steel beam that will be affixed to the top of the steel tower. The beam will be located inside the construction parking zone across from the Emergency entrance, with convenient public parking in the nearby garage. Our staff will be on hand with markers at these time:
Friday, April 23
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Monday, April 26
7:00 -9:00 a.m.
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Tuesday, April 27
7:00 – 9:00 a.m.
You may also sign the memorial book that will be placed in a time capsule for the new building. If you miss our beam signing, the book will be available all year at various events for signatures and messages.
Our thanks to DPR Construction and every worker on the project for bringing us one step closer to a new hospital.
Cassandra Clark, Project Communications Director
While California earthquake safety legislation is the driving force behind new hospital construction such as ours, earthquake safety doesn’t begin or end with new construction. For many years, Eden Medical Center has participated in the California Strong Motion Instrumentation Program (CSMIP) by placing seismic motion sensors in the building to gather vital information when an earthquake strikes.
Recently, the Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley project team reached agreement with the California Department of Conservation to place sensors in the new hospital once it is completed. The agreement is good news for seismic research, and it ensures that Castro Valley joins other Sutter hospitals with seismic sensors, including Sutter Coast Hospital, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center and Novato Community Hospital. New construction at Mills Peninsula and California Pacific Medical Center will also have seismic instrumentation to provide essential data on San Andreas fault activity and to record the performance of the unique seismic structural systems employed at these facilities.
The instruments are part of a statewide network of strong motion instruments that ensures any strong ground motion, from a moderate to larger size earthquake, in California will be recorded.
Monitoring the Data
The CSMIP installations are advanced earthquake monitoring devices called accelerographs, which are placed at various representative geologic foundation materials to measure the ground shaking. When activated by earthquake shaking, the devices produce a record from which important characteristics of ground motion (acceleration, velocity, displacement, duration) can be calculated.
Accelerographs that are installed in buildings such as hospitals, bridges, dams, utilities and industrial facilities are selected by engineers and scientists representing industry, government, and universities. The program has installed more than 900 stations, including 650 ground-response stations, 170 buildings, 20 dams and 60 bridges. Many of these installations can be found locally along the Hayward fault (see map for more information).
The Office of Statewide Health and Planning and Development (OSHPD) arranged for CSMIP to begin instrumenting hospital buildings in 1989, and the program has instrumented 29 hospitals and health facilities throughout California.
Significant strong motion records have been helpful in shaping California’s seismic safety standards. Data gathered from the 1994 Northridge earthquake, for example, led to changes in California’s Uniform Building Code and gave engineers a greater understanding about the integrity of building structures after an earthquake.
An example of an accelerometer, placed at the Los Angeles Fire Command Center.
About CSMIP
The CSMIP is a program within the California Geological Survey of the California Department of Conservation and is advised by the Strong Motion Instrumentation Advisory Committee, a committee of the California Seismic Safety Commission. Current program funding is provided by an assessment on construction costs for building permits issued by cities and counties in California, with additional funding from the California Department of Transportation, the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, the California Department of Water Resources, and other agencies.
More Resources
To learn more about the data collection and dissemination process, visit the CSMIP Website. To view existing data gathered from recent California earthquakes, visit the Center for Engineering Strong Motion Data.
All photos courtesy of the California Department of Conservation.
by Cassandra Clark, Project Communications Director
Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley is still under construction, but it is already earning international recognition. The project’s social media program is the winner of the 2009 Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) Excellence in New Communications Award for External Communications & Communities in the Nonprofit Division.
The honors were shared with developers Creative Sage/Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates and G2 Communications, Inc., social media strategy and communications consultants.
The award winners were announced at the 4th Annual SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards gala at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley is a $320 million construction project to replace Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley.
The Society for New Communications Research Awards program honors innovative organizations that are pioneering the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities, and collaborative technologies in the areas of media, marketing, public relations, advertising, entertainment, education, politics and social initiatives.
“The Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley social media program has been precedent-setting in the health care field. It has included using a variety of social media tools—a blog site with a Webcam, video, architectural renderings and other multimedia content, plus popular social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and YouTube—to engage the community in open discussion about the design and construction of a new hospital,” said Project Communications Director Cassandra Clark. “We set out to reach new audiences and involve them in our process, and we discovered new ways to have conversations between the public and the project team, including the architects, engineers and president of the hospital. It’s a major shift in how we communicate, and we are seeing positive results.”
SNCR Senior Fellow Albert Maruggi nominated the Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley Social Media Project, the first social media project of its kind undertaken by Sutter Health as a pilot program, for the award.
Business author Shel Israel, who is also a Senior SNCR Fellow and Advisory Board member, included the story of the Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley social media project in his recently published book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods (pp. 103-105), and agreed with Mr. Maruggi that the SMCCV project could qualify for a SNCR Award. They both remarked that they “loved the story” and found this social media outreach project to be “unique, a first of its kind” as a health care community advocacy program.
“Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley’s social media program is an impressive example of the successful and innovative use of new tools, technologies, solutions and practices to enhance communications and relationships,” commented Jen McClure, founder and president of the Society.
A list of winners and all the winning case studies submitted to this year’s SNCR awards program have been published on the Society’s website.
Eden Medical Center received the Silver Medal of Honor from the Department of Health & Human Services for achieving national goals for organ and tissue donation for two consecutive years. Eden, the regional trauma center for Alameda County, works closely with the California Transplant Donor Network to identify possible candidates for organ and tissue donation, and in turn with families to ensure that their wishes are met.
The work of the many caregivers at Eden– including the Trauma Team, ICU, surgical team, respiratory care and social work services – is heart wrenching when a young life is taken. Their efforts on behalf of families and those in need or organ or tissue donation brings a sense of hope and the knowledge that many other lives can be saved or improved.
Read the entire story in this week’s Oakland Tribune.
Photo of the collapsed Cypress Overpass, courtesy of U.S. Geological Society.
by Cassandra Clark, Project Communications Director
This week we are commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. The media will cover the remembrances, the progress we have made since then, the victims, the heroes.
Those of us who were around then have memories of this momentous event. My memories are perhaps much more vivid than most. That single event changed my life, changed my career, and ignited in me a passion for health care and the important work we do.
I had worked at Eden Hospital only 2 months when the earthquake hit. My boss was on vacation, camping in the desert far away from news of the quake, and I was a newbie just learning the ropes. I left work that day just before 5 to get home to meet some friends to watch the World Series. I was driving my VW convertible down Castro Valley Blvd. when the ground started shaking and the road before me started moving like a snake. I thought my tires were falling off and that the street lights above would fall on me! I drove the few minutes to get home, only to find the power out and the phones dead. So I headed back to the hospital to check in, as per our protocol
I didn’t leave the hospital for two days.
We had 42 patients from earthquake-related injuries that night in Emergency and Trauma. The worst were from the Cypress structure collapse in Oakland, brought to our Trauma Center. Not knowing the details, I went first to the Emergency Room, where I sat and listened to one young man talk about leaving his car on the collapsed upper portion of the freeway, climbing down the side of the concrete rubble, and then calling his mom to pick him up. He had an injury to his mouth and was shaken, but he told us the details of what happened. I still remember his face, his name, the shocking details of his story. The TV in the corner of the waiting room was showing news coverage from Oakland and San Francisco, and I got word out to the hospital staff so they would know what was happening.
We set up the Command Center sometime later. Soon, the reporters started showing up and the media calls poured in from all over the country, all over the world. Gloria, my co-worker, and I gathered information from every department, and talked to patients and families. As the spokesperson for the hospital, I conducted interviews for the next two days and, as it turned out, for many months that followed. I was so tired at 4 a.m. when Harry Smith from CBS New York called that I could hardly get the words out. It wasn’t my best interview, but I was new at this! We tried our hardest to keep all the information straight: how many patients, where they were from, what their injuries were. We had calls from families trying to find loved ones. We had calls from local residents wanting to know how to help. Reporters from other parts of the country were under the impression that the entire SF Bay Area was reduced to rubble, and they wondered how we could even take care of patients.
Over the next several days, I got to know so many of the patients and their stories. Some did interviews, some just wanted to talk privately. Some couldn’t talk, their injuries were so severe the nurses didn’t think they would survive. Two patients from one van on the Cypress freeway were the most severely injured, but they survived, and I remember them and their stories as if it were yesterday. I met their families and got to know them over the next six months or so. And I saw the incredible care that Eden Medical Center’s staff provided. The doctors, the nurses, the respiratory therapists, physical therapists, social workers: all of them played such an important role in their medical and emotional care.
It was because of this experience that I knew that I was in the right place, that the mission and purpose of our organization was alive and carried out in the most complex, and the simplest, ways. We all made a difference, and we were all here for one reason: to take care of the people who need us in the most critical times. It didn’t matter what our role was, we all had a responsibility to take care of them and their families. I didn’t check vitals or change dressings, but i could spend time with each of them, help them process what had happened, help them tell their stories if they wanted. I could help their families and our staff with simple things to make their lives there easier.
A year later, we held a press conference with a couple of the patients who survived, along with their doctors and nurses. It was an emotionally charged event, before and after the conference, for one patient in particular. The memories were so vivid and frightening, but she wanted, or perhaps needed, to talk about it, to see the trauma surgeon and staff, to process what had happened. Years later I saw her and her colleague on a PBS special, talking about their lives since the earthquake. My heart ached, and still does, for the pain they endured. Their lives were never the same. I don’t know where they are now, but I still think of them, pray for them, and wonder if they were able to persevere.
Five years after the earthquake, I met a woman who came into the hospital to give birth to twin boys. She, too, was severely injured in the earthquake and came to our trauma center that night. She had such severe abdominal injuries that she was told later by her doctor that she would not be able to have children. But life had other plans for her. On this day, October 17, 1994 — the 5th anniversary of the quake — she gave birth to her “miracle” boys. The trauma surgeon who saved her life 5 years earlier assisted in the delivery. They are 15 now, and I wonder if they know how incredible their story is.
These stories, and many others, are on my mind as we approach the 20th anniversary of the quake. It amazes me how much our lives are intertwined by such an event. And how each person I met has their own memories, and their own scars.
I am also grateful for the experience, for all that I learned as a result, and for finding my passion in my career. Today, as I work with the Project Team to build a new hospital, I am reminded why this project is so important. I am proud of the tradition of care at Eden, and proud to be working toward construction of a new hospital so that the tradition can continue for many years to come.
Sutter Medical Center Faces Costly Delay, Loss of Construction Jobs as State Deadline Looms
The California Nurses Association (CNA) has filed a lawsuit that threatens the future of the new Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley now under construction.
“That the nurses union would sue to stop us from building our new hospital after a decade of planning is extremely frustrating to our employees, physicians, volunteers and patients who have worked so hard and so long for this,” said Eden Medical Center President & CEO George Bischalaney. “This political action by the union hurts everyone, puts thousands of jobs in jeopardy, threatens the future of the hospital and could cause irreparable harm to the community.
“This type of action drives up the cost of health care for everyone. After an exhaustive and inclusive public process, the union’s lawsuit could mean will not be able to meet the State’s 2013 deadline to replace the Eden hospital. Not meeting the deadline could result in closure of current hospital before the new hospital is completed and certified for occupancy.”
The Environmental Impact Report and land use entitlements were approved by the Castro Valley Municipal Advisory Council, the Alameda County Planning Commission and Alameda County Board of Supervisors. The first phase of construction has been approved by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Alameda County granted necessary permits and construction started July 1.
The new medical campus will create more than a 1,000 union jobs during the three years of construction and pump millions of dollars into the local economy benefiting many local businesses.
Construction crews demolished the vacant Pine Cone Apartment complex and began relocating the helipad and are readying the site for the foundation of the $320 million, seven-story, 130-bed hospital and regional trauma center. The new medical center will expand needed emergency and urgent care services. A new 80,000-square-foot medical office building for physicians is also planned. Sutter Health is financing the entire project with no public taxes or funding.
Sutter has invested more than $200 million in capital in Eden Medical Center’s facilities since acquiring the hospital from the Eden Township Healthcare District in 1998. The new hospital and medical office buildings would bring this investment in the regional medical campus and trauma center to more than $600 million by 2013.
Employees enjoy the Groundbreaking Ceremony
By George Bischalaney, President & CEO, Eden Medical Center
It’s finally begun! Twelve years of planning, ten years of actively working, and finally, ground was broken on Wednesday July 1, 2009, for the new hospital on the Eden Medical Center campus. It has been an extraordinary effort by so many to get us here. Persistence, patience and untiring efforts have paid off.
The first phase of work involves relocation of the helipad, a necessary step to clear the way for development of the hospital and medical office building. It will be challenging throughout and very difficult at times.
The immediate impact is loss of on-campus parking. Not a lot, but unfortunately in a place where it is needed. This work is occurring adjacent to the Emergency and Trauma Services entry points. Ambulance bays remain accessible and the existing helicopter landing site remains functional throughout this phase. Parking for patients and visitors is affected and will be relocated a couple of times as work progresses.
Already there is activity in other areas of the broader construction zone. An apartment building facing Stanton Avenue was reduced to rubble in a matter of two days. The neighborhood is experiencing the onset of three years of traffic associated with the project, as debris is removed and equipment and supplies arrive.
Work was temporarily interrupted and the worksite cleaned up for a brief but well received ceremonial groundbreaking event on July 1. Employees, physicians, the project team and Eden Medical Center as well as Sutter Health leadership officially christened the site with the photo-op tossing of dirt. It was an exciting moment for those who have waited to so long for this day.
As the work progresses, our official site for tracking the work will keep those who check in up to date. And coming July 20, there will even be a webcam for viewing the work as it proceeds.
Let us know if you have any questions or comments.
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