By ANN DONAHUE

Staff Reporter

As assistant vice chancellor for health sciences capital projects at UCLA, Sarah Meeker Jensen has coordinated the design and construction of everything from examination rooms to outpatient clinics.

But nothing comes close to her current project overseeing the new $1.3 billion hospital complex that will become the southern gateway to the school campus.

In that role, the licensed architect is the point person between a committee of doctors who will use the medical center and the architects and construction firms that will start building it later this year.

Jensen said the plan is to create a high-tech hospital with an environment that’s conducive to spiritual as well as physical healing. To that end, every patient room will be private and feature a large window while being wired with fiber-optic cable to aid electronic monitoring and record keeping.

Question: Why is the new medical center necessary?

Answer: We had the earthquake in 1994. We hired a structural engineer who said the situation is very grave, and we wound up hiring four different firms to come in and do an assessment. They concluded the structures built after the codes changed in 1973 are all good, which means that in the event of another major earthquake they won’t sustain significant damage.

What happened, though, was that this (main) complex was built in the early 1950s, and it was built without any kind of seismic engineering. The concrete in the complex was cracked to the point that it was not expected to be operational after another major earthquake. The engineers believe they can come in, and by adding concrete and epoxy and buttressing, repair some of the buildings. (Others) are considered to be unrepairable. That includes the hospital, neuropsychiatric hospital, neurology center, Brain Research Institute and school of public health. It actually took them 15 months to determine all that.

Q: What did you think when you heard all this work needed to be done?

A: It’s unbelievable. We peeled off the vinyl wallpaper in the patient rooms, and the walls were just cracked all the way through. In some ways we feel like we’re in a race against time. Another huge earthquake shouldn’t hit here soon, but it will in time.

Q: What happened after the damage was documented?

A: We hired architects and started discussions about where to put the hospital and whether we should put it on campus or off campus. Where should it be? Has the campus become too dense? Ultimately we decided to knock down a parking structure and keep it on the campus because the hospital depends so much on the research that’s happening here. It’s so intertwined with the researchers and the other professional schools (on campus). To take it away would make it just another hospital.

The thing that sets this hospital apart is that a lot of therapies, a lot of patient treatments are from the doctors who are also doing research. For people who have (health problems) that are not easy to solve, and for things that need the next generation of medicine, the patients are just two steps away from the lab door.

All the doctors realize that if they physically separated the hospital from the labs, they wouldn’t have that connection, and the patients wouldn’t have that more immediate kind of benefit.

Q: How will the new hospital work with the existing outpatient care services next to the site?

A: The health sciences area grew up in the 1950s and ’60s and became more and more of a conglomeration than a complex. It’s impossible to navigate. As the concept of outpatient care began to take root, (administrators) realized there’s no way we can have an outpatient care center in the middle of this complex. It’s just hopeless.

In 1990 we opened three buildings across the street and a huge parking structure. That’s the outpatient medical center, with private practice physicians affiliated with UCLA, outpatient clinics and mental health clinics. We thought the smart thing to do would be to put the hospital there so the patients, once they’ve been to the clinic, know how to orient themselves to the hospital. There’s a certain amount of sharing of the facilities and expensive equipment that can happen. It’s also easy for the doctors who are working in the clinics to go over to the hospital and make rounds.

Q: How did you decide on the size of the hospital?

A: In spring of 1997 we hired the architects and really got going. We had studied the number of beds and by 1995 we had acquired Santa Monica Hospital. We factored that into the number of beds and began to think that primary and secondary care would go on in Santa Monica and more tertiary and quaternary care would go on here. One of the key things that came out of the programming study was that the one thing we know about the future was that we don’t know about the future. The key concept in this building has to be really flexible and apply some concepts of modularity.

Q: How does the hospital layout break down?

A: Most people will arrive by driving up Westwood Boulevard through (an area) where there are heavy trees. Then they will reach a large plaza that will be brick and concrete and take from the (design) of the UCLA campus. It would be about the size of the Royce-Powell Quadrangle and have a real sense of arrival.

You could either drive down to a whole level of parking on the basement level or and this is really unbelievable we’re going to have valet parking. It sounds luxurious, but the problem now is that you have to leave your sick or injured friend or family member and then you’re going to have to go find them. What are they supposed to do, sit on the curb?

The first level of the hospital has a lobby, dining commons, gift shop and administrative offices. Also on the first floor will be all the imaging, radiology and emergency departments.

The entire second floor is interventional procedure rooms, operating rooms, and rooms for angiography and angioplasty. The third floor is the medical equipment power room. We call it the mechanical floor, and it’s placed above the interventional floor because it’s easier if you need to add more air conditioning. Usually operating rooms are in the basement and you’re venting out to the roof. So if you want to make a change in the temperature you have to alter 12 floors to do it. The change can’t happen quickly.

On the fourth floor there are roof gardens. The only patients (mobile enough to walk extensively) are psychiatric patients, and they need to get out and play basketball and things like that. So we’ve located the entire psychiatric hospital on the fourth floor. The child psychiatric patients, adults and geriatrics patients will be in different wings.

On the fifth floor is the children’s hospital. The rooms are large because there is the bed and bathroom, and at the window ledge is a seat that turns into a bed. The goal is to get rid of those large waiting areas with plastic furniture that nobody wants to go in.

There’s always a huge window. With the curved walls, each window has a slightly different view.

On six we have neurosurgery and neurology. On seven, cardiology and cardiac surgery, and on eight oncology. This is one of the county’s trauma facilities so we have two helipads on the roof, and we have high-speed elevators that are equipped like operating rooms going up and down from there.

Q: How is fund raising going and what kind of impact is Mike Ovitz having on the process?

A: I would say it’s going reasonably well, although it’s a huge undertaking and there’s always a need for more money. What has impressed me so much about Mike Ovitz is his enthusiasm for UCLA and the project. He really cares a lot and works hard on a volunteer basis, which is unusual for someone who has as many pressures and activities as he does. He spends lots of time with our provost, Dr. Gerald Levey, and they make calls to each other at all hours of the day and night. He’s already made a $25 million donation.

Q: Is anything in the new center going to be named after him? The children’s hospital became the Mattel Children’s Hospital when they gave $25 million.

A: Right now he’s looking over the design and the architecture and trying to decide which piece he’d like to name. He’s been pretty altruistic and let other people name pieces of the hospital that were important to them first (like Mattel).

Q: What kind of say do the doctors have in the design of the hospital? How about when it comes time to tear down some of the old buildings?

A: We’ve had so many people working on getting pieces to fit together. We have a group of 200 doctors and nurses who meet every Thursday. They’ve been doing this now for four years. They have been extraordinary.

They worked on the floor plan. Right now they’re working on things like the security system and how to manage the parking. They really work as the advisory group to the architects. For phase two, we’ve got a large committee assembled. We’re in the early phase of asking, how do we do this? We’re probably going to have to move some people’s laboratories I mean, they’ve got 20 years of cancer research in there. It is a huge challenge.