Healthcare in the 21st Century

The Blue Ribbon Panel's Community Outreach Task Force (COTF) noted that healthcare is changing.

A Continuum of Healthcare

As our population ages and technology improves, the definition of wellness must expand to include a continuum of care through different stages of people's lives.

Adding assisted living having fitness, nutrition and exercise programs and facilities IS the future of health care.

These things are in keeping with a walkable, livable neighborhood where there’s no hard edge between a hospital and a neighborhood--or between a hospital and other forms of health maintenance or wellness.

Urban Standalone Hospitals are Obsolete

If these elements are increasingly part of healthcare, then a stand-alone hospital makes less sense.

Long, blank walls without active groundfloor uses make this a place people aren't interested in being in. On the contrary, a ground floor restaurant/café serving healthy food--perhaps as part of a cooking school-- would give people a reason to walk to the hospital and to change their perception about what a hospital is—and about St. Luke’s in particular.

"Save" St. Luke's Again in 10 years?

As is stands now, building a new hospital will fix only one of St. Luke's many outstanding problems: earthquake retrofitting (see St. Luke's Woes).

This will leave all the remaining issues to deal with, and will inevitably lead CPMC to have to return to consider again how to save St. Luke's.

Think Big Instead!

Instead we could be transforming St. Luke's into a vision for the future--one that includes the whole continuum of healthcare. Our proposal shows what we mean.