UCSF Children's Hospital has been given $100 million to help fund the construction of its new home at the UCSF Mission Bay campus near downtown San Francisco, the hospital announced today.
The gift is a private donation from Marc Benioff, founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, a San Francisco-based sales and customer services applications provider. It is the largest gift ever granted to the UCSF Children's Hospital.
With the gift, the hospital is being renamed UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. The new name will apply to the hospital at UCSF's Parnassus Heights campus and to the future UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital at Mission Bay, part of a 289-bed integrated hospital complex for children, women, and cancer patients. Construction of the new hospital begins this year.
"In business, we say that people overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade. This is true in philanthropy as well," Marc Benioff said. "We will give exclusively to UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, which has the research base for the next generation of discoveries, a commitment to advance health worldwide, and a focus on every child, regardless of resources. This is where we believe our time and resources will make the most impact in the next decade and beyond."
The $100 million gift is one of the largest private donations ever made to a children's hospital in the United States and is the fourth largest philanthropic gift in UCSF's history.
"The Benioffs' extraordinary generosity will have a direct impact on the many thousands of young patients cared for at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital each year," said Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. "UCSF and the Benioffs share a commitment to performing at the very highest level, and we look forward to realizing our joint vision of creating the world's most advanced children's hospital at Mission Bay."
The gift completes the $125 million matching gift to the Campaign for UCSF Medical Center made in March 2009 by The Atlantic Philanthropies and its founder Charles F. Feeney. The match comes in two years ahead of schedule and brings the total raised for the $600 million capital campaign to $320 million.
UCSF is also launching an interactive website that will invite visitors to help shape the future of the new Mission Bay hospital. The UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Ideas site will offer an open forum for submitting suggestions about the new facility, including innovations in care and patient amenities.
When it is completed in 2014, the 183-bed UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital at Mission Bay will offer urgent/emergency care, pediatric primary care and specialty outpatient services; and, with 45 more beds than the existing hospital and an on-site helipad.
The proximity of the hospital site to UCSF's 42.5-acre biomedical research campus will speed the application of laboratory discoveries to the treatment of pediatric patients in the Bay Area and beyond, Laret said.
The Mission Bay children's hospital has been designed specifically for children and their families. Innovative equipment, child-friendly décor, and rooms and resources that engage the whole family will be large enough to enable parents to stay with their children around the clock. The new hospital will also have thousands of square feet of rehabilitation, play therapy, and outdoor garden areas.
The entire hospital complex also has been sustainably designed and will be certified LEED Gold by the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.
John Commins is a content specialist and online news editor for HealthLeaders, a Simplify Compliance brand.