San Diego Hospital Achieves LEED

SAN DIEGO — Opened in October 2010, the new $260 million Rady Children‘s Hospital Acute Care Pavilion in San Diego has been LEED certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.

 

Built by McCarthy Building Companies, Inc., the 279,000-square-foot facility is the first acute care hospital in the state to meet the standards of quality and safety mandated by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD), while also meeting the level of occupant health and environmental sustainability required to earn it LEED Certified status.

 

Stantec was the project architect; KPFF of San Francisco served as the structural engineer; RBF of San Diego was the civil engineer; Randall Lamb of San Diego was the electrical engineer, and Shadpour Consulting Engineers, also of San Diego, was the mechanical engineer. Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey of Mill Valley was the landscape architect.

 

“Construction oversight of LEED-certified projects adds a heightened level of complexity to already complicated healthcare construction projects in California, based on the state’s strict criteria for earthquake safety,” said Tim Jacoby, vice president of facilities for Rady Children‘s Hospital, who led the successful team collaboration. “We congratulate the project team for not just meeting but exceeding the hospital‘s expectations for sustainability, and applaud them for their roles in creating a world-class LEED Certified facility.”

 

The new Acute Care Pavilion was built on a 148,650-square-foot site at the southeast end of the hospital campus, adjacent to the existing Rose Pavilion. Second and third-floor bridges and a ground-floor walkway connect the existing facility to the new four-story building.

 

The pavilion houses a surgical center, 84 medical-surgical beds, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and a cancer center. It features 16 operating rooms with associated support departments, a 28-bed hematology and oncology unit and a 10-bed bone marrow transplant intensive care unit.

 

The project team earned an “Innovation in Design” credit for the inclusion of multiple healing gardens that utilize sustainable design principles and aimed at reducing the stress felt by patients and their families.

 

The project team used recycled and locally obtained steel, concrete and other building materials, low VOC-emitting paints, glues, carpet and wood and water-efficient landscaping. A reflective concrete “cool roof” was installed to minimize heat entrapment and control rainwater run-off.

 

Nearly 80 percent of construction waste materials at the job site were recycled.

 

“Construction execution required a great deal of creative solution-finding, tracking and monitoring to keep the project on course toward LEED Certification,”said Steve Van Dyke, project director for McCarthy. “Where there was even the slightest doubt, we took extra measures and precautions to ensure compliance with the LEED credits, thus hitting our target of 31 points, five more than we needed to become certified.”