St. Luke’s Update – The Future Is In Your Hands
May 18, 2009
Tomorrow, Tuesday the 19th of May, at 2PM, there will be a San Francisco Health Commission hearing on St. Luke’s and the CPMC master plan.
Please email the commission and let them know what you think, or better yet attend. (According to the SFHC site I believe the meeting is at 101 Grove, Room 300, but I am not certain.)
Here’s what *I* think:
- The current plan for St. Luke’s is flawed and was taken without enough community input. The neighborhood wants a better St. Luke’s. The CPMC master plan does not make for a better St. Luke’s.
- The neighborhood doesn’t want faceless walls along Cesar Chavez, or the ass-end of the hospital up against the houses on Guerrero, or a dead Valencia Street:
- This city is clearly moving towards livable streets, yet this design seems to ignore that. How does the CPMC plan integrate with the Cesar Chavez Street redesign? Beats me.
- I obviously am in favor of a Valencia Street Park. It would make for a better hospital.
Anyway, attend if you can, or email the commission with your thoughts.
9 Comments
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Burrito Justice 
Terrific post, Burrito J! The Health Commission will largely focus on what happens within the walls of St. Luke’s buildings. They are charged with reviewing if the proposed mix & menu of healtcare services proposed by the Blue Ribbon Panel for St. Luke’s are appropriate. The Health Commission is the right public policy body to tell that we need an Urgent Care center (for not quite emergencies), or more Doctor’s offices in the neighborhood, for instance. Do we need to have heart surgery at St. Luke’s? Do we need liver transplants? Do we need Labor & Delivery? Which services would make the neighborhood go to the St. Luke’s campus rather than the way it is now? What do we really want nearby; and what are we willing/able to go elsewhere for? Our answers help define how big the hospital and associated buildings need to be.
Hey.
No one from the neighborhood was able to speak today. The Coalition for Better Healthcare Planning and CPMC each submitted blocks of speaker cards – so public comment was ended for the item before anyone from the neighborhood could speak. Depressing. The Health Commission meets again on 6/19; and the Commission encouraged written comment (mailto: health.commission.dph@sfdph.org)
Please don’t hate me, but I wouldn’t go to St. Lukes to have a wort removed. But I’m proud as hell of people like Gillian who care enough to work for the day when I would at the very least go there to experience decent architecture. I hear they are really trying to upgrade the facility, and embracing the desire of the community to upgrade it in every sense of the word would be a good omen. Hello. Is anyone listening? Where is the leadership from our supervisor?
It’s about the overall health needs of the city not just some nimby idea of what is needed at the site. It’s time that G street neighbor association pulled its head out of the sand and joined the fight against cpmc instead of undermining the community’s response
On Burrito’s statement that the plan was taken “without community input,” I’d like to dispute that claim: The Blue Ribbon Panel on the future of St Luke’s held two meetings of public comment, as well as 3 held by the Community Outreach Task Force that Gillian was on. Also, over the last three years there have been 5-6 hearings about various details related to the present and future of St Luke’s at the SF Health Commission and a similar amount at either the full SF Board of Supervisors or one of the Committees, as recently as November 2008.
In total, that’s upwards of 15 opportunities for the community to be heard on all matters related to St. Luke’s. There was in fact an enormous amount of public comment at many of these hearings, in some cases exceeding three hours of public comment on a single day. For those of us with long-term involvement in City politics, what was striking was how consistently community members were clamoring for MORE services at St Luke’s.
Maybe Burrito refers to a different community, or has a different standard of “sufficient input,” and the plan did change from the last public comment, but it cannot honestly be claimed that there have not been opportunities for community input.
When was the design of the building decided?