Dear UCSF Community:
To continue to ensure a safe working environment amid the coronavirus pandemic, this week UCSF will begin an asymptomatic testing program for employees, trainees, and students who work onsite.
This testing is voluntary, and individuals will be selected at random to participate. The screening will add to our ability to quickly detect whether the virus that causes COVID-19 is spreading in our buildings so we can contain it. This new program will supplement the important and effective prevention strategies of mandatory universal surgical masking in our clinical facilities and face coverings on UCSF property, daily health screenings, physical distancing, and increased cleaning of our facilities.
We will begin by identifying a random sample of people who worked for more than 12 hours during the prior week at the Precision Cancer Medicine Building on the Mission Bay campus. We hope to make the program available to those who work at our Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay, and Mount Zion campuses in a phased rollout by the end of August. Participants will once again be selected for testing at random. This program may be extended to other UCSF sites in the near future.
Those chosen to participate will be asked to self-administer nasal swabs under the guidance of a trained staff member, and they will receive their test results as soon as possible, depending on laboratory testing volumes and capacity. Everyone’s data will be safeguarded, and no individually identifiable data will be shared publicly.
This new random sampling of our UCSF population augments the asymptomatic testing we have already been conducting for new and returning trainees and students,...
Dear UCSF Community,
We are pleased to share the exciting news that UCSF has selected two highly regarded architectural firms to serve as the design team for the new hospital at Helen Diller Medical Center at Parnassus Heights.
The firms, Herzog & de Meuron, a Switzerland-based architectural firm known for its innovative design, and HDR, a multidisciplinary, human-centered architecture practice, bring significant expertise in designing health care facilities in urban settings around the world.
The architects will help us realize our vision for the hospital of the future as a holistic health care setting designed around the needs of the patient, connected to the natural environs of Parnassus Heights and the community. The architectural team will work with UCSF, with input from the local community, to design a hospital that is integrated with our world-renowned research and teaching enterprise, and aesthetically complementary with the neighborhood.
Importantly, the new hospital will expand our capacity to serve more patients who are referred to UCSF for the highly specialized care we offer. The number of patients we have had to turn away due to a lack of bed capacity at Parnassus Heights is approaching 3,000 a year. You can read more online about the new hospital and the architects.
The UC Regents recently approved us to start work on our new hospital, a project launched with a generous...