Growth & partnerships

Groundbreaking for 14-story hospital tower and 5-story pavilion

In July UC Davis Health hosted a groundbreaking for the medical center’s California Tower, an expansion project that includes a 14-story hospital tower and 5-story pavilion designed to deliver superior care and adapt to meet evolving community needs.

“The addition of the California Tower to UC Davis Medical Center is a testament to our innovative forward thinking across our health system and main campus,” said UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May. “This project will position our researchers, students, faculty and staff to meet and adapt to regional health care needs for the next 50 years.”

The new tower will add nearly one million square feet of space to the existing medical center, with operating rooms, an imaging center, facilities for pharmacy and burn care, and about 334 private rooms for patients.

More than 250 of the rooms are being designed for greater flexibility in the event of a patient surge such as a pandemic, wildfire or other disaster. These will easily convert into intensive-care-unit rooms with air isolation to treat patients of any level of hospitalization.

“With the California Tower, we are building a new paradigm of patient care, centered around how a health system can deliver tomorrow’s health care today,” said David Lubarsky, M.D., M.B.A., F.A.S.A., CEO of UC Davis Health. “We are building into this new tower some of the lessons we learned from the recent pandemic.”

The $3.74 billion tower will replace parts of the hospital that must close due to state seismic regulations; hospitals across California are upgrading facilities or constructing new buildings that can withstand major earthquakes. The current, 646-bed hospital — the largest in the Sacramento area — will have a total of 675 to 700 inpatient beds when the project is complete in 2030.

Enloe is newest Cancer Care Network affiliate

As the newest affiliate of the UC Davis Health Cancer Care Network, Enloe Health can now open innovative clinical trials with the full support of UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. The affiliation brings the latest discoveries in cancer care to Enloe Regional Cancer Center without its patients leaving their local health system. In May, Enloe Health held a groundbreaking for its new Gonzales Comprehensive Cancer Center, a 97,000-square-foot facility expected to open in 2026 and replace the Enloe Health Regional Cancer Center. The new center will serve Northern California between Colusa County and the Oregon border with expanded care space, advanced treatment options, enhanced equipment, integrated supportive therapies and more.

Creating a model temporary surge facility

To help hospitals better prepare for patient surges, UC Davis Health in collaboration with the Department of Defense has created a model for a temporary structure to respond to a future public health emergency. The project, formally called Improving Modular Patient Admission Capacity Through Scalable Solutions or IMPACTS, is a pilot in partnership with the National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) and Defense Health Agency, funded through a DOD grant. The team designed and created a 56-bed modular surge facility, or MSF, and deployed a sample at UC Davis Medical Center. Further testing will take place in a military setting at Travis Air Force Base, and the team will create a manual and training curriculum.