The Grossmont Healthcare District (GHD) and Sharp Grossmont Hospital recently held a joint groundbreaking ceremony for a new Heart and Vascular Center on the hospital’s campus. The ceremony marked the start of construction of a state-of-the-art facility that will greatly enhance patient care at East County’s largest hospital. The event also included the launch of a $10 million capital campaign to fund the acquisition of medical technology and equipment for the new facility.
The more than $60 million construction cost for the Heart and Vascular Center is being financed by taxpayer dollars. East County voters passed a $247-million bond measure called Proposition G on the June 2006 ballot. As proposed in the hospital’s Facilities Master Site Plan, Prop. G is funding several infrastructure construction improvements at the publicly-owned hospital, which opened in 1955. The bond-financed construction began in 2007, and is scheduled to continue over the next several years.
Since Prop. G bond dollars are allocated only for construction costs, the Grossmont Hospital Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps raise funds for Sharp Grossmont Hospital, has begun raising $10 million for medical technology and equipment for the new Heart and Vascular Center.
The three-story, 71,000-square-foot Heart and Vascular Center will greatly enhance the hospital’s ability and capacity to treat acute care patients and help decrease the high cardiovascular disease mortality rate in East San Diego County with the best and most advanced care available in the community, hospital officials said.
The center will expand the hospital’s surgery capabilities with new cardiac catheterization labs and multipurpose procedural rooms that can support a wide range of specialties, including general surgery, minimally invasive surgery and image-guided surgery, as well as endovascular interventional procedures.
