Move over, IKEA! Emeryville’s most visited new destination may become a just-announced $1 billion Sutter Health medical center, as the Berkeley area was soon to lose its last remaining full-service hospital.
There has been anxiety brewing in the East Bay’s Berkeley-Emeryville-Albany area, because that area is slated to lose its last full-service hospital when the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center was scheduled to close by the year 2030. That hospital’s operator Sutter Health deemed that building seismically unsound, but Berkeley officials have been sounding the alarm saying the closure would render that area a “hospital desert.”
They are not sounding those alarms anymore. The Chronicle reports that Sutter Health has just announced a new $1 billion “Sutter Emeryville Campus” in Emeryville, the city that is immediately to the south of Berkeley. Sutter Health said in a Wednesday press release that the new facility would be a combined “acute care medical center, primary and specialty care clinics, destination advanced care centers, urgent care facilities and ambulatory surgery centers.”
“Our Emeryville campus project represents one of the most significant investments we’re making across our system over the next decade and is part of our broader vision to meet the community’s growing demand for expanded access to our services across the East Bay footprint,” Sutter Health president and CEO Warner Thomas said in the same press release.
The main new medical center would go into the big vacant brown patch in the image above. Two other adjacent existing buildings at 5555 Hollis Street and 5300 Chiron Way would be repurposed into outpatient service facilities.
To put this into perspective for casual Emeryville visitors, the new facility will be less than a mile north of the famed Emeryville IKEA, or about a half-mile south of the Emeryville Public Market food court.
But Berkeley officials are still quite pleased with the location. “I am excited that Sutter Health is continuing its commitment to healthcare access for the East Bay region with this new medical center,” former Berkeley mayor and current East Bay state Senator Jesse Arreguín said in the press release. “Our community has long advocated for expanded healthcare services and this new facility in Emeryville is a testament to that collective effort. I look forward to continuing our partnership with Sutter Health to ensure that East Bay residents receive the high-quality emergency and primary care they need and deserve.”
Okay yes, this is the same Sutter Health whose 2020 price-gouging scandal landed then-Supervisor Hillary Ronen on a 60 Minutes segment. That scandal resulted in a $575 settlement ruling against the healthcare giant.
Of course, these medical facilities are years away from being completed, with patients first arriving in 2028, and full construction not expected to be completed until 2033.
Related: Sutter Health, Other Bay Area Healthcare Systems Purchase Special Freezers For Storing Pfizer’s COVID Vaccine [SFist]
Images via Sutter Health
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