University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center

Infobox Hospital
Name = Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center
Org/Group =


Caption =

Location =
Region = Los Angeles
State = California
Country = US
HealthCare = Private, Medicaid, Medicare
Type = Teaching
Speciality =
Standards =
Emergency = I
Affiliation= University of California, Los Angeles
Beds = 600
Founded = 1955
Closed =
Website = http://www.uclahealth.org/homepage_med.cfm?id=264
Wiki-Links = |

The Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is a hospital located on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California.

It is rated as one of the top three hospitals in the United States and is the top hospital on the West Coast according to [http://health.usnews.com/sections/health/best-hospitals/index.html US News & World Report] . The hospital has been ranked in the top twenty in 15 of the 16 medical specialties ranked by the U.S. News ranking. Ten of those specialties were ranked in the top ten. UCLA Medical Center has research centers covering nearly all major specialties of medicine as well as dentistry and optometry, and is the primary teaching hospital for the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The hospital's emergency department is certified as a level I trauma center for adults and pediatrics.

Architecture

.Citation | last = Groves | first = Martha | title = UCLA health center readies move | newspaper = Los Angeles Tims | pages = B1, B6 | year = 2008 | date = June 25, 2008 | url = http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ucla25-2008nov11,0,6746611.story] Because several hospitals were severely damaged during the Northridge quake and injured people had to be transported long distances for emergency care, the state of California passed SB1953, an amendment to an older law requiring all hospitals to move their acute care and intensive care units into earthquake-safe buildings by 2008.

Originally budgeted at $598 million in 1998, construction began in 1999 with a completion date of 2004. Cost overruns and construction delays attributed to rising construction costs and design changes due to medical advances resulted in the price of the building increasing to $829 million. Equipment purchased for the new building increased the total cost to over $1 billion. The Federal Emergency Management Agency contributed $432 million in earthquake relief funds to the project and the state of California contributed $44 million. Private donations raised over $300 million to the project, including $150 million in President Reagan's name.The new building was constructed to withstand an 8.0 magnitude earthquake, one of the first buildings in California built to the most recent seismic standards.

The new 1,050,000 square foot hospital is named after President of the United States and Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. It was designed by C.C. "Didi" Pei in collaboration with his father, renowned Pritzker Prize-winning architect I.M. Pei, and has been touted to be the most technologically advanced hospital in the world. The hospital will contain fewer patient beds (525) than the one it replaces. Patient beds in the intensive care units will be accessible to nurses and doctors from 360 degrees, and surgical floor plans will be modular allowing them to be expanded and reconfigured as medical technology evolves. The hospital is sheathed with mechanically honed, cream colored, horizontally grained travertine marble panels sold at below-market-rate cost by Primo Marrioti, the owner of an Italian quarry whose cancer was cured at UCLA. The travertine elements were fastened to a sophisticated interlocking panelized aluminum cladding system developed by Benson Industries of Portland,Oregon. The building envelope is designed to resist and survive severe seismic events and while maintaining excellent resistance to air and water infiltration.

Some of the old complex will be torn down and some of it will be renovated and turned into office space when it is no longer an operational hospital. The law does not require that all parts of a hospital be made earthquake-safe, only the most important parts. Much of the extensive travertine wall cladding from the building's interior will most likely be salvaged and re-used.

The older center itself is a sprawling 11-story brick building designed by Welton Becket. It is considered a landmark of early modern architecture. The center was built in several phases, the first of which was completed in 1953. The hospital has a "tic-tac-toe" layout of intersecting wings, creating a series of courtyards throughout the complex. The first floor is unusual in that most of its walls are completely clad in a thick layer of naturally-weathered travertine, creating an unusual "organic" appearance. The exterior architecture is very simple (as with many Becket designs), consisting of a red brick wall with horizontal bands of stainless-steel louvers over the windows to keep direct sunlight from heating the building.

Reputation in oncology research

UCLA Medical Center is well-known as the defendant in a famous Supreme Court of California case, "Moore v. Regents of the University of California", 51 Cal. 3d 120 (1990) [http://online.ceb.com/calcases/C3/51C3d120.htm] . The court decided that patient John Moore had no property rights in the immensely profitable "Mo" cell line which UCLA researchers had discovered when they removed his cancerous spleen.

Nobel Prize in Medicine

UCLA faculty member and pharmacologist Louis Ignarro's discovery of one of the most important signaling molecules in the human body, nitric oxide, led to the Nobel Prize in medicine. This discovery revolutionized the fields of cardiopulmonary medicine and immunology.

Celebrity Hospitalizations

UCLA Medical Center will fire some employees and discipline others for snooping at the confidential medical records of Britney Spears, who was hospitalized in its psychiatric ward, it was reported on March 15 2008. Several workers were fired after they were caught snooping after Spears gave birth to her first son, Sean Preston, in September 2005. [ [http://edition.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/03/15/britney.hospital.ap/index.html Hospital staff face firing for Britney snoop] ]

Breaching

On April 7, 2008, it was revealed that medical records of several high profile patients, including First Lady of California Maria Shriver, actress Farrah Fawcett, and singer Britney Spears, were breached by a hospital worker. [ [http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/celebrity/la-me-ucla7apr07,1,3528956.story?track=rss More UCLA records abuses] ] [ [http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1728363,00.html?xid=rss-topstories Celeb Records Snooped in California] ]

References

See also

*Harbor-UCLA Medical Center
*Olive View-UCLA Medical Center
*Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center
* [http://www.uclahealth.org/ UCLA Health System]