$1 Billion Expansion to Irvine Hoag Hospital Underway

Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, Calif., on Oct. 22, 2020. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Construction has begun on a $1 billion expansion of Hoag Hospital in Irvine, which will add two hospitals specializing in women’s health, digestive illnesses, and cancer.

“Having a hospital provide services for complex issues, here locally, is beneficial for everyone,” Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan told The Epoch Times.

The new facilities will be named the Sun Family Campus in honor of philanthropists Diana and David Sun, who donated $50 million to the hospital in March after Diana’s 95-year-old mother underwent successful brain surgery at Hoag’s Pickup Family Neurosciences Institute.

“When we get to some of these clinical spaces, it’ll literally change healthcare for the greater Irvine community in a very meaningful way,” Hoag CEO Robert Braithwaite said in a press release.

The campus will include six new, three-story buildings and will add 155 hospital beds, eight operating rooms, and 120,000 square feet of additional space. The new buildings will also have offices, inpatient and outpatient facilities, a pharmacy, and laboratories.

The new services and equipment are meant for clinical trials and research, and to increase access to complex treatments so the hospital does not have to send patients elsewhere.

With the expansion, up to 1,500 new staff—many with specialized training—will be hired, according to hospital officials.

Construction is expected to be finished by 2025.

A nurse and a worker stand in front of an emergency tent set up to handle an increase in COVID-19 patients outside of Hoag Memorial Hospital in Irvine, Calif., on Dec. 11, 2020. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Additionally, Dr. Burt Eisenburg, the executive medical director for the Hoag Family Cancer Institute, said the expansion will include special urgent care for cancer patients.

It will provide a place to go for such patients instead of the emergency room where “they can get immediate attention to their cancer-related problem,” Eisenburg said in a press release.

Research and new programs will be introduced at the new facility to explore early detection and prevention methods for cancer patients.

The decision to include a women’s health hospital came after officials found that, of the 6,500 babies the hospital delivers each year, 40 percent of delivering women drove there from Irvine. The addition will allow the hospital to provide for another 5,500 deliveries each year.