The new Ocean Tower at Community Memorial Hospital opened to patients on Sunday, Dec. 16, when all the patients were transferred from their rooms in the old Mountain Tower to their new ones in the Ocean Tower.
The transfer of CMH patients to the new building took the bulk of the day on Sunday and was completed without incident. Overall 130 patients were moved.
“The transfer of our patients into their new rooms is a final and much anticipated step in opening our new hospital to the community. We’ve been waiting a long time for this day and are thrilled it arrived and all went well as expected,” said CMH President and CEO Gary Wilde. “We remain grateful for the community’s ongoing support of our new hospital.”
Community Memorial Health System built the new Ocean Tower to meet seismic requirements that the state of California mandated after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, to replace an aging structure built in the 1960s, and to attract the next generation of physicians. The new CMH will better meet today’s needs and expectations for high-quality care and patient privacy. All 250 rooms in the six-story Ocean Tower are private rooms.
The Ocean Tower is adjacent to the current/old hospital, now called the Mountain Tower. The Mountain Tower will remain in use and serve a variety of functions, including housing rehabilitative services, the GI Laboratory, respiratory therapy, laboratory services, nuclear medicine, physiology, nutrition services, the growing Graduate Medical Education Residency Program and administrative offices, among other uses.
