City of Hope Orange County (Calif.) has finalized the county’s only cancer specialty hospital, part of its $1.5 billion Orange County expansion.
The 73-bed hospital in Irvine, Calif., is set to welcome its first patients Dec. 1, according to a Nov. 19 City of Hope news release. It is on a 72-acre academic research campus offering a full continuum of advanced cancer care.
Orange County — the sixth-largest county in the U.S., where cancer incidence rate is projected to rise 18% over the next decade — will soon gain access to cancer-focused expertise, acute and outpatient care, clinical trials and advanced technology, the release said.
The new facility is a sister hospital to Helford Clinical Research Hospital in Duarte, Calif., where City of Hope is based.
“At City of Hope, we are building on a more than 100-year legacy of breakthroughs, changing the trajectory of national cancer care by bringing the latest cancer discoveries and leading-edge treatments directly into more communities across the country,” City of Hope CEO Robert Stone said in the release. “Our Orange County campus will be a living promise of hope where thousands of lives will be saved, transformed and made whole again.”
Nearly 600 new employees have been hired at the hospital, Annette Walker, president of City of Hope Orange County, told Becker’s. She described the process as unique, noting it began with a “blank slate.”
“It’s just very different than adding on to a facility that already has standard operating procedure,” Ms. Walker said. “Everything is from scratch.”
The hospital includes four operating rooms functioning as a unified surgical unit, cancer-focused clinical trials, 24/7 immediate care and coordinated acute and outpatient services.
Patient input was key to the project’s design, Ms. Walker said, with more than 500 patients, families and community members contributing. Their feedback also informed the development of a multidimensional spiritual care center, which uses immersive technology to transform the environment based on user-selected preferences.
How the project came to ‘light’
For leaders managing large-scale facility launches, discipline in executive and resource management is essential, Ms. Walker said. She applied the “green light, yellow light, red light” system — a method she has used to track staff performance and the organization’s strategic plan — to the project. Tasks marked green were complete, while yellow or red items indicated potential or actual risk.
“When you’re in leadership, you have so many variables to keep track of, and individuals who bring you variables. That methodology keeps in front of you how success is going to be measured and when you’re expected to deliver that particular outcome,” Ms. Walker said. “It speeds every conversation to, ‘Tell me what you’re having problems with. How can I help you, and how do we resolve this as a team, to keep this moving and make sure that we’re not delayed, or that we achieve the goals that we wanted to achieve?'”
Caring for the workforce is also critical in large projects — and day to day.
“You love your people, they’re going to love your patients,” Ms. Walker said. “Healthcare has so many good people with big hearts, and as a leader to be authentic and open your heart to them is just as important as you expecting them to open theirs to patients. So be that leader who’s close, be that leader that’s approachable. Be that leader who really cares — show up and show it.”
Ms. Walker also emphasized the boldness of the investment.
“This was a unique proposition in healthcare for an organization like City of Hope to make a commitment to come to what most would consider a pretty saturated market,” she said. “There’s over 30 acute care hospitals in Orange County, and we had to understand that the community need was compelling enough to take that risk, because our product is specialized and not what generally can be done by most hospitals, with regard to the physician scientists and the clinical trials to land something like that in a saturated market.”
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