Zuckerberg and Chan gave $75 million to a public hospital

Person: Mark Zuckerberg
Lived: b. 1984
Field: Technology
From: American

The story

San Francisco General Hospital, whose roots go back to the city's first public hospitals of the 1850s, has stood on Potrero Avenue since 1872. Run by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, it is the only Level I trauma centre for the 1.5 million residents of San Francisco and northern San Mateo County, and in 1966 it became the second designated trauma centre in the United States. It is also a teaching hospital for the University of California, San Francisco, and its Ward 86 played a key role in identifying and treating early cases of AIDS.

Above all it is a safety-net hospital, caring for poor and elderly patients, uninsured working families and immigrants. As of 2014, 92 percent of its patients either relied on publicly funded insurance, Medicare or Medi-Cal, or had no insurance at all. It is also the city's largest acute hospital for psychiatric patients and the only one offering round-the-clock psychiatric emergency care.

The hospital also needed a modern building able to withstand earthquakes. In November 2008 San Francisco voters approved an $887.4 million bond for the rebuild, and construction began in 2009. Priscilla Chan had studied medicine at UCSF, whose doctors and nurses work alongside city staff at the hospital.

In February 2015 she and Mark Zuckerberg endowed the hospital's foundation with $75 million, money intended to help fund equipment and technology for the new building. It was described as the biggest individual donation ever made to a public hospital in the United States, covering roughly 7 percent of the project's overall cost. In recognition, the hospital took the name Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

The new acute care building opened in 2016. It was the first hospital building in San Francisco to sit on a base-isolated foundation that can move 30 inches in any direction during an earthquake. Its Emergency Department more than doubled, from 27 to 58 beds, operating rooms increased from 10 to 13, and separate medical and surgical intensive care units were combined into one.

The gift showed how private philanthropy can strengthen a public institution that treats everyone who comes through its doors, whatever their means. Today the hospital continues to provide trauma, emergency and psychiatric care for some of the city's most vulnerable residents, in a building designed to keep working when disaster strikes.