Pomerado Hospital Breaking Ground on New Bridge

The following was released by Palomar Health:

Pomerado Hospital and the Pomerado Outpatient Pavilion will be linked by more than a common name soon. An 84-foot-long bridge will connect the Poway hospital with the five-story outpatient facility and help ease access between the two buildings for patients, visitors, physicians and staff members.

Palomar Health will hold a special ceremony Wednesday, Oct. 3, noon to 12:30 p.m., to mark the pending start of construction of the pedestrian bridge and the continuing improvements at the Pomerado campus.

The groundbreaking ceremony will be held just outside the Pomerado Hospital’s Emergency Department, 15615 Pomerado Rd. Leaders from Palomar Health, Arch Health Partners, a major tenant in the outpatient pavilion, and Pacific Medical Buildings, which owns the building, will participate in the event. PMB is funding construction of the new bridge.

“This aesthetically-pleasing bridge is an important piece of the development of the Pomerado campus. It ties everything together, the parking structure, Pomerado Outpatient Pavilion, Pomerado Hospital and Villa Pomerado skilled nursing facility,” says Pomerado Hospital chief administrative officer David Tam, M.D. “It is a critical link in integrating the campus as a whole.”

The enclosed bridge will extend from the second floor of the northwest side of the Outpatient Pavilion building, 15611 Pomerado Rd., out toward the hospital. The bridge elevators will deliver patients and visitors to the ground floor where they will be able to enter the hospital from a new outdoor plaza near the entrance to the Emergency Department. The pedestrian bridge will overlook the rolling hills of Poway.

Hospital users will be encouraged to park in the nearly 1,200-space parking structure behind the Outpatient Building and enter the hospital from the new bridge and plaza. The new bridge will also allow hospital patients requiring services and procedures at the outpatient facility to be easily transported from their rooms, via wheelchair or gurney. It will also benefit patients of Arch Health Partners, which operates an urgent care facility, in the event they need to be transferred to the hospital’s Emergency Department.

“The bridge has been a planned addition since the Pomerado Outpatient Pavilion building was completed and will be an important enhancement of patient and staff access,” says Pacific Medical Buildings Senior Vice President for Development Jim Rohan.

Construction is scheduled to start in mid-October and to be completed in spring 2013.

The bridge is part of Palomar Health’s facilities master plan, which supports the renovation and expansion of the Pomerado Hospital campus. In the past few years, the central plant on campus has been renovated and the outpatient pavilion and adjacent parking structure have opened.