McCarthy Completes Build on California Hospital Facility

By Eric Althoff

GREENBRAE, Calif.—McCarthy Building Companies Inc. announced that the design-build contractor has completed construction on the $535 million Oak Pavilion at MarinHealth Medical Center, located in the Bay Area’s Marin County. The new healthcare facility was designed by architecture firm Perkins Eastman Architects.

The new building, which is five stories tall and encompasses 260,000 square foot of care space, features an emergency department, trauma center and an area devoted to psychiatric and “high-security” patients. The building is home to 114 private patient rooms as well as six modern operating rooms.

For this particular project, McCarthy applied its so-called EQUIP program, by which over 7,000 new pieces of medical equipment were procured, while an additional 1,169 pieces were transferred from the hospital’s existing buildings. The EQUIP model has the construction team work with vendors to ensure that equipment is tested and installed properly, so that minimal changes are needed later.

The hospital’s exterior space features gardens, many of which will be viewable to patients and healthcare staff thanks to each patient room having room-length windows.

McCarthy said that Oak Pavilion will almost certainly qualify for LEED Gold certification given that it incorporates energy-efficient and high-performance elements such as utilizing a pump chiller as the primary heating and cooling source. Furthermore, specialized silver ion filtration systems will reduce the transmission of airborne pathogens, and individual areas can be converted for isolating patients who may in fact be infectious.

Angeles Garcia, who oversaw the hospital build for McCarthy, said that staff needed a top-level facility in which to deliver and receive care, and added that Oak Pavilion will be a crown jewel in the Bay Area’s burgeoning healthcare sector.

“Since inception, every aspect of the MarinHealth Medical Center has demonstrated the team’s commitment to providing an advanced, top-quality healing environment to the community and its dedicated healthcare professionals,” Garcia said in a recent statement about the hospital.

Dr. David Klein, CEO of MarinHealth, said that the Oak Pavilion is coming online at a time when national—indeed, worldwide—healthcare is more important than ever as the medical community faces down a once-in-a-century pandemic.

“Our project partners did an amazing job of adapting to the current COVID-19 landscape, quickly and safely, to deliver an advanced, modern facility that is fully equipped to respond to the needs of the region,” Klein said in a recent statement, adding that the Oak Pavilion will be a boon to the North Bay area for decades to come.

McCarthy and its project partners worked to ensure that the new healthcare building met all relevant distancing standards that have come about in the covid-19 pandemic. And, being situated in the seismically active Golden State, the facility needed to be built to handle earthquakes as well, and thus care was taken to ensure its stability.