At UC Davis Health, we’re changing the world of health care as we move ahead on our post-pandemic journey. We’re already hard at work cultivating new relationships and innovations that will expand and improve patient care, building robust community partnerships, and offering next-level educational programs for future leaders in medicine and nursing. We’re focused on delivering “tomorrow’s health care today,” based on what patients will need from us (and our unique level of care), in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, and well beyond.

As this fall issue of UC Davis Health magazine shows, we’re transforming care in many ways — one example is our Healthy Aging Initiative, which includes a new older-adult outpatient clinic in midtown Sacramento that will support older adult patients and their caregivers.

To put our narrative into historical context, we are turning the spotlight on the 150 years of patient care at our location and how our original facility — the Sacramento County Hospital — grew into the leading-edge institution it is today by responding to the needs of patients through the decades from this same spot in Northern California.

It’s clearly a time for growth at UC Davis Health. We are working on a multi-year Clinical Strategic Plan, plans to expand our nationally ranked schools of health, and multiple key construction projects on our campus. These include preparations for a new 14-story tower at the UC Davis Medical Center (to be called the ‘California Tower’); a new outpatient surgery center (pending UC Regents approvals); completion of the brand new 4-story Ernest Tschannen Eye Institute building; and a second licensed hospital on our Sacramento campus — the UC Davis Rehabilitation Hospital. Off campus, we’re looking at expansions for several of our key suburban neighborhood clinics, and across all of these locations and the region, we’re stepping up to offer our highly-acclaimed patient care more broadly and deeply.

Our patients and people are at the center of everything we do. Throughout the pandemic, I was inspired by the strength, resolve and empathy that I saw firsthand among doctors, nurses, staff, students and everyone in the UC Davis Health community — and how they delivered for our patients in the toughest of circumstances.

We’ve emerged stronger than ever, and as we look ahead, it’s clear much more diligent work and out-of-the-box thinking remains to be done for the best interests of our patients and communities, especially in the area of bridging health equity gaps in underserved communities and partnering with allies.

As the scientist Jane Goodall once said, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Let’s build on our successes and work together to achieve even greater things for our patients in the future.