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Hospital building heart center


[Picture]

Matt Heistand
Arizona Daily Wildcat

The University Medical Center's Sarver Heart Center is currently under construction. The renovations, which began in August, are scheduled to be finished by August of 2000.


By Irene Hsiao
Arizona Daily Wildcat,
October 15, 1999

The Arizona Health Sciences Center will soon feature the state-of-the-art Sarver Heart Center, which will promote cardiac research and improve facilities.

The new center's construction began in August and is on schedule to be completed in August 2000, said Gordon Ewy, director of Sarver Heart Center and UA professor of medicine.

He said construction workers will be putting up steel beams for the next few weeks. Ewy said the amount of progress being made in a day is similar to that involved in building a house.

"It's exciting - the steel beams," he said. "One day there is the beams and the next day they've got it (the building) framed."

The heart center will double the three-story University Medical Center building. This "roof-raising" of the building is projected to cost $9.7 million and will add 30,000 square feet.

When the center is completed, the top floor will have eight wet labs for biomedical research. The fifth floor dry labs will be used for analyzing research and housing computers. Most of the fourth story is for student teaching, Ewy said.

Jim Kuhlmann, a union iron worker for Peck Steel Co. Inc. who has been working on the center's structure for the last three weeks, said the construction is going smoothly.

"We're doing great so far," he said. "We're just mainly doing our job as safely and efficiently as we can."

Additionally, two AHSC clinics and two other neighboring University of Arizona clinics will be relocating to a 46,000 square foot complex at 707 N. Alvernon Way.

Four of the University Physician's clinics are being moved east of the hospital to the former Thomas-Davis Medical Center buildings. UPI is a non-profit corporation made up of the 300 practicing doctors from the College of Medicine.

Two of the medical offices were moved into the Alvernon buildings last weekend, while the other clinics are still waiting for the remodeling to finish. Norm Botsford, the CEO of UPI, said they hope to have them moved in within the next few weeks.

The Ophthalmology and Neurology clinics moved into the new location first because they had to vacate their office building for widening of North Campbell Avenue.

The UA Department of Orthopedic Surgery's clinics have been in the UMC since the hospital opened in 1972. Botsford said the department moved because there was not enough space.

The UA's Department of Family and Community has been operating out of an old fraternity house since it was organized in the late 1970s, he said.


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