Harbor–UCLA Medical Center, is a 570-bed public teaching hospital located at 1000 West Carson Street in West Carson, an unincorporated area within Los Angeles County, California. The hospital is owned by Los Angeles County and operated by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, while doctors are faculty of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who oversee the medical residents being trained at the facility.
The facility is one of two level I trauma centers (providing the highest level of surgical care to trauma patients) operated by Los Angeles County, the other is LAC+USC Medical Center.
History
A medical facility was originally opened on the site in 1943 as the U.S. Army's Port of Embarkation Hospital, which was a receiving point for the wounded returned from the Pacific theater during World War II. Situated on a tract of , it had an administration building and a large number of barracks wards arranged under the cottage system.
In February 1946, the county purchased the facility from the Federal Government in order to decentralize the activities of the Los Angeles County General Hospital, one of the largest institutions of its kind in the world, and founded a branch hospital to serve the South Bay and Long Beach areas.
The Los Angeles County Harbor General Hospital began its affiliation with UCLA School of Medicine in 1951. Construction of the present eight-story hospital building was completed in late 1962 on the easterly portion of the grounds, at Carson Street and Vermont Avenue, replacing a number of the wooden barracks and cottages comprising Harbor General. It was dedicated January 14, 1963.
Affiliation with the UCLA School of Dentistry was established in 1972. On September 1, 1978, the name of the hospital changed officially to Los Angeles County Harbor–UCLA Medical Center in order to draw attention to its working relationship with the UCLA School of Medicine.
On December 13, 1983, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center as one of the first six trauma centers in Los Angeles County, all of which were designated Level I. The Supervisors stipulated that they be open for business at 8 a.m. two days later. Two more (UCLA Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center) gained Level I status later that month and still have that standing today. Today, Harbor-UCLA is the only Level I trauma center south of the Santa Monica Freeway and Santa Ana Freeway as well as west of the Los Angeles-Orange County line.
The Harbor–UCLA Medical Center campus is home to The Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation, an independent, not-for-profit research institute. Originally known as the Harbor-UCLA Research and Education Institute (REI), then as The Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed), The Lundquist Institute has been conducting biomedical research, training young scientists and providing community services, such as one of California's largest and most comprehensive Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Programs.
In Popular Culture
The main eight-story hospital building became known the world over as the fictional "Rampart General Hospital" in the popular 1972 to 1977 television series, Emergency!. The emergency receiving area as seen in the television series was completely remodeled in the 2000s, and no longer appears as it did in the show.
Innovations
Pioneering research in many fields such as reproductive endocrinology, genetics, infectious diseases, trauma and respiratory medicine has brought worldwide attention to the Harbor-UCLA campus. Among the major milestones are: In 1984, Harbor-UCLA was the first institution in the world to achieve successful pregnancies using the technique of ovum transfer. The research team was directed by Dr. John Buster that performed history's first embryo transfer from one woman to another resulting in a live birth and led to the announcement on February 3, 1984. In the procedure, an embryo that was just beginning to develop was transferred from one woman in whom it had been conceived by artificial insemination to another woman who gave birth to the infant 38 weeks later. The sperm used in the artificial insemination came from the husband of the woman who bore the baby.