By Tatiana Sanchez | Bay Area News Group for the Mercury News
SAN JOSE — Santa Clara Valley Medical Center marked a new era Saturday with the unveiling of its new Sobrato Pavilion, a facility boasting cutting-edge technology and innovation that officials say will put the needs of patients first.
The six-story, 370,000-square-foot building, with 168 private patient rooms, is named after prominent Silicon Valley philanthropist John Sobrato, because of his record-setting $5 million donation, matched by another $5 million raised by the VMC Foundation.
Hospital administrators and local politicians unveiled the pavilion with a ribbon cutting Saturday morning, where several hundred people toured the facility as a live band — made up solely of Valley Medical staff — played outside.
Santa Clara County Executive Jeff Smith said the pavilion “will allow tens of thousands of our employees to provide services of care to millions of individuals over its lifetime.”
The new $468 million facility, now nearing completion, was built using the final allotment of funds from Measure A, an $840 million bond measure passed by Santa Clara County voters in 2008 to pay for hospital seismic safety and medical facilities, including a downtown San Jose clinic that opened last year.
The pavilion will allow patients like Ran Tao to start anew, administrators said.
Tao, of San Ramon, was studying computer science at UC San Diego when he broke his spine during a snowboarding accident in the winter of 2016. The accident left him in a wheelchair, and Tao remembers feeling overwhelmed and afraid of what the future might hold.
“I was lying in a hospital bed for the longest time. It was about two weeks, but it felt like ages,” he said. “I felt like I couldn’t do anything anymore. I couldn’t move any of my body below my chest. It was very scary.”
