After years of planning, SF hospital moves its ailing patients

On Saturday, 13 transport teams at San Francisco General Hospital worked with hundreds of medical professionals to bring the bedridden patients from the 1970s-era main hospital across a second-floor mezzanine skywalk to the new, neighboring acute trauma center, which officially opened its doors for the first time. “We move patients all the time, but this magnitude is much, much bigger,” said Iman Nazeeri-Simmons, the hospital’s chief operating officer. The move started at 7 a.m., when the new center opened, with transport teams putting the most seriously ill patients in new beds, before taking them across the bridge to the new facility. Patients with their newborn babies joined others with critical injuries and an array of other health issues as they were wheeled on beds covered in white sheets through the sun-filled mezzanine, even as they remained connected to IVs and heart monitors and were surrounded by health care workers. The transported patients each required their own nurses, respiratory therapists or other health care workers to properly care for them during the move. The new facility was built to meet new seismic standards and will house departments with patients so ill they may not be able to evacuate the building in the event of an earthquake, Kagan said. The cafeteria, office space, conference rooms and psychiatric services will remain in the old hospital, Kagan said. Hospital officials, including the entire executive team, met with each transported patient before the move to answer any questions they may have had. The new center is smaller than the old hospital, at 453,000 square feet compared with approximately 600,000 square feet, but is laid out in a way that makes its use more efficient for the health care workers, Nazeeri-Simmons said. [...] she said, the new center’s 58-bed emergency department will come equipped with its own X-ray and CT scanners, so patients won’t have to be transferred to another department.