With only a day to go before patients and staff are transferred from the old UCLA Medical Center into the new UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, some of the movement has already begun in preparation for a 12-hour shift that will begin early Sunday morning and end with a new, fully operational hospital Sunday afternoon.
Moving services have been taking medical supplies to the new center over the past week, said Dr. David Feinberg, chief executive officer of the UCLA Hospital System. This is to ensure the new center can cope with any emergency situations that may arise during the move, he added.
In addition, elective surgery has now been halted, meaning no patients from other hospitals will be brought to the current medical center until the move is finished Sunday afternoon, he said.
To ensure that the movement of patients goes as smoothly and quickly as possible, starting 3 a.m. Sunday, the entire hospital will be on diversion, meaning all ambulances will be diverted to other hospitals,
Feinberg said.
All these precautions will decrease patient numbers from the normal 500 to 600 down to about 350 patients in an attempt to decrease traffic and ensure the best care for patients during the transitional phase.
“Patient care remains the priority, and the move will not interfere with that,” Feinberg said. “We are used to taking care of the sickest of the sick, and we move patients around the hospital for care purposes all the time. This will be no different.”
The families of patients will also be a top priority on moving day, Feinberg said. The relatives of patients will be kept at 200 Medical Plaza until 1:30 p.m., when they will be directed to the new rooms of their loved ones in the new hospital, he added.
The absolute precision of the plan of movement has been compared to a
“military-style” exercise, where the old and new hospitals will be working together in synchrony as patients are transported across Westwood Plaza at a rate of one patient every two minutes via emergency vehicles, said Dr. Gerald Levey, dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
“After 14 years of planning and getting ideas together, the final product is nearing its opening,” Levey said.
Every detail of the move has been considered and planned; even the old emergency room has an exact time to close. The hospital’s emergency room will close at 5 a.m. as the new one opens at precisely the same moment Feinberg said.
Hospital officials feel confident about the move. They said they’ve conducted multiple mock moves and trained more than 10,000 staff members to make the transition as smooth as possible.
The full collaborative effort is what makes it state-of-the-art, Feinberg said. Considering the work put in by the 500-person team that designed the intensive care unit rooms as well as the contributions by the 60-member full-time transition training staff, Feinberg said he believes the new hospital is ready to accept a full-patient transplant.
Health Care Relocations is the moving company UCLA has hired to conduct the hospital switch, and the company has allocated a large portion of its staff to the move because of the number and conditions of patients the UCLA Medical Center contains.
Officials report that Health Care Relocations moves about 20 hospitals each year, but the UCLA team is ready with backup including extra ventilators, elevator mechanics and respiratory technicians in case something goes wrong.
With one patient being transported every two minutes across Westwood Plaza to the Ronald Reagan Medical Center, all patients should be in place in the new center at exactly 3 p.m. Sunday if all goes as planned, Feinberg said.