What does it take to kick an important fundraising campaign into gear? It typically requires just equal parts vision and money. The UC Davis Health System, with its new Surgery and Emergency Services Pavilion project, has been fortunate in that regard.

Thanks to a recent grant from the San Francisco-based Koret Foundation Funds, the health system is another step closer to a goal of raising $20 million for its new surgery and emergency department facility. Koret donated $500,000 to support the project, which is now under construction at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.

Claire Pomeroy, vice chancellor for Human Health Sciences at UC Davis and dean of the School of Medicine, called the gift a key element in the successful completion of a much-needed building that is scheduled to open in 2009.

"As the region's population grows," said Pomeroy, "it's clear we also need to keep growing to meet the expected demand for medical services, especially in the areas of trauma and emergency care."

The $424-million Surgery and Emergency Services Pavilion addresses a number of challenges UC Davis faces as the only Level 1 trauma center for the rapidly growing Sacramento region. Given a rising number of patients, new kinds of medical equipment and the state's building safety requirements, the medical center's current emergency department and operating rooms are both undersized and in need of prohibitively expensive seismic upgrades.

For the emergency department, the new facilities will be able to accommodate 70 patients at a time, up from 43. The busy department will be about 8,000 square feet larger than the current location, affording more patient privacy and a larger, more comfortable waiting area, where three dozen chairs will be added to the 76 seats now available.

The surgery department is also expanding in size, adding eight operating rooms to the existing 16 and nearly doubling its overall size to 50,000 square feet. The department, which already handles more than 10,000 surgeries a year, will add 20 intensive care beds for its post-operative care, with half of them for trauma and vascular cases and the other 10 for cardiac and transplant patients.

Additionally, plans for the Surgery and Emergency Services Pavilion call for expanding the UC Davis Regional Burn Center, which is one of only two such units in Northern California certified by the American Burn Association. The new unit will double its current size to more than 12,000 square feet and add another four beds to an existing eight.

New locations are also slated for the departments of Cardiovascular Medicine, Radiology and Clinical Laboratory Services, which hospital chief executive officer Ann Madden Rice said will benefit both patients and staff alike.

"The new pavilion," said Rice, "is essential to our ability to provide the high quality service this community expects from us."

Charles Casey is a senior public information representative for the UC Davis Health System.