Sutter’s California Pacific Medical Center Van Ness Campus Hospital Project, a $2.1-billion, 274-bed hospital in San Francisco, California, has won top honors from the Construction Users Roundtable. The project was awarded the Construction Industry Safety Excellence Award, which recognizes project teams that have achieved high levels of safety performance, culture and innovation to achieve zero injuries. The project also won the Construction Industry Project Excellence Award, which recognizes projects that add value, eliminate waste and increase overall excellence in safety, cost performance, schedule performance, quality and innovation.
Occupying an entire city block in the second-most densely populated city in the U.S, VNC is Sutter Health’s largest project to date and the first new hospital in the heart of San Francisco in more than 25 years. The 13-story facility is home to nearly 1 million square feet of acute care program space, including two levels of below-grade parking, and is designed to provide advanced healthcare services such as cardiac, transplant and orthopedic surgeries, adult and neonatal intensive care, labor and delivery and emergency services. Every detail of the maternity, orthopedics, emergency and pediatric care services is geared toward creating a healing environment for patients. The new hospital is connected to a nine-story medical office building via a tunnel below Van Ness Avenue.
From 2013 to 2018, 5.4 million hours were worked at this site, with no fatalities and only two lost workdays reported. At its peak, with approximately 1,000 workers onsite, the project had 15 safety professionals working collaboratively on the Safety Leadership Group. This team was responsible for setting safety goals and policies, as well as being a key resource for safety expertise and questions.
Specific initiatives contributed to the high degree of safety on the jobsite were:
- Trade partners qualification included rigorous safety standards
- Safety Leadership Group used Lean tools for continuous improvement
- Pre-job meetings were held with all trade partners to establish project expectations, roles and responsibilities, desired outcomes and review site-specific safety needs
- Project teams worked with safety professionals to develop and implement strategic safety plans prior to the start of construction
Transparency and a high degree of collaboration were critical to the success of this project. Using IPD, the team prioritized up-front planning and ongoing communications between the owner, architect, construction manager and subcontractors. Other IPD tools used include:
- Weekly discussion on cost impacts and solutions for shared savings
- Use of advanced modeling and fabrication techniques
- Production team with leaders from each trade partner focused on production management, creating high levels of efficiency
- Inspector of record co-located with the team and joined the daily design and execution discussions
The IPD team consisted of Sutter’s California Pacific Medical Center, SmithGroup (architect), HerreroBoldt (general contractor) and 14 additional risk and reward members.
Photo source: smithgroup.com.
