Hospital openings in Irvine mean lots of new hiring in region

When the sprawling City of Hope and UCI Health hospitals open in Irvine within days of each other early next month, it will be with approximately 1, 800 new staff. And Hoag is already hiring hundreds of additional employees to man an expansion of its Irvine campus with three new health institutes next year. Already, the region has “been feeling the impact of these investments,” Orange County Business Council President and CEO Jeffrey Ball said of the boom of jobs related to so much development and construction happening at one time. “Now, we’re moving into the more permanent clinical and administrative positions. “Many regions would give anything to have that in their area.” More than 18, 000 applications flooded City of Hope Orange County’s inboxes when it was hiring for the 740 positions its new 73-bed specialty hospital needs for its opening Dec. 1 in Irvine, said Annette Walker, president of the cancer care center’s expansion into the county. Just two years ago, her team opened a new 190, 000-square-foot outpatient center that also demanded a sizable hiring effort. Selecting staff for the new hospital, Walker said, was a laborious and intricate process one that spanned beyond browsing resumes and conducting interviews, but also making sure the needs of the county’s diverse communities are met, whether housing would be available and if Orange County could support the variety of skills needed. “It’s a big undertaking,” Walker said of building City of Hope’s new Irvine campus. “And I’ve always said that hiring would be the thing that worried me the most.” Who’s coming to Irvine? In 2018, City of Hope decided to expand into OC; for decades, it has offered Southern California its specialty cancer care from its Duarte campus, and this move into Irvine cuts the commute for so many. First, it built the outpatient care center that opened in 2022. Then it turned its attention, almost immediately, to the construction of the hospital just feet away. “So we’re gonna nearly double the number of people that we need to hire, and it’s going to be in basically a three- to four-month period that we’re gonna hire 740 people,” Walker said of the task that was at hand. Most of these are full-time positions of the more than 700 hires, just 69 are part-time and 37 are per diem. And the largest profession hired for was nurses more than 100 were needed. Dr. Carol Ann Friedman, interim associate dean of the Golden West College School of Nursing, anticipates the new hospitals making Orange County a more attractive location to stay for the school’s graduating cohort of 120 or so nursing students each year. “From the perspective of a nurse, it’s great to work at a hospital like UCI and City of Hope, which are of magnet status,” she said. “And to be able to get their first jobs, to be able to develop their skills at a high-quality institution, when you’re a new nurse, it’s really important to get that type of experience.” UCI Health’s new seven-story, 144-bed acute-care hospital, opening Dec. 10 in Irvine, was also “flush” with applicants, said Dr. Ryan Gibney, the medical director of the hospital’s emergency department. Overlooking the vast 300-acre San Joaquin Marsh Reserve from its spot on the edge of the UC Irvine campus off Jamboree Road, the 350, 000-square-foot facility the sixth in the academic health system that includes its founding UCI Medical Center trauma hospital in Orange will be the nation’s first all-electric hospital. “I had 51 (physician assistants) apply for five positions,” Gibney said. “I think there was 400 people in one of the job fair days for nursing alone. “People want to be here,” he said, “which is what I think we’re seeing when these jobs went up, people lining up out the door.” To care for the patients who will soon be visiting UCI Health-Irvine for its emergency room and operating rooms, about 180 physicians will be needed. But UCI Health also has the trauma center in Orange and, in recent years, acquired or opened several other medical centers around Orange County. So some physicians, such as surgeons, will float around, but it recruited 70 specifically for Irvine, spokesperson John Murray said. And when UCI Health-Irvine welcomes patients next month, it will be staffed with about “970 non-physician positions, including nurses, therapists and environmental services staff,” Murray said. A snapshot of UCI Health’s hiring logistics: For its emergency room, the hospital had about 40 positions to be filled. “About 30 of them were transfers, nurses in Orange that applied to move over,” Murray said. And that internal hiring “was enormously beneficial, because then we get an experienced staff that knows how to run an ER and understands all of our clinical policies.” Like City of Hope, which took into consideration language barriers and Orange County’s diverse communities while hiring, UCI Health was “intentional about who we hired, too,” Gibney said. “We have people that are native Korean speakers, Vietnamese, Arabic, Spanish. We have one that speaks Hindi. So all doctors are going to be able to interface with a population that exists around here,” he said. And as part of Hoag’s ambitious expansion at its Sun Family Campus in Irvine, which will add six new buildings, institutes dedicated to digestive health, cancer and women’s health and 155 new inpatient beds when complete next year, its leadership is in the midst of a staffing ramp-up. Hoag’s approach to hiring begins “long before a job is posted,” said Michael Krug, vice president and chief human resources officer. “We engage with future talent early through community partnerships, local schools, universities and career events well before they’re ready to apply.” All these jobs also start well before doors officially open, as departments and teams are built from scratch. And hiring for these hospitals is not limited to nurses and physicians; it takes cooks, janitors, security, ultrasound techs, phlebotomists, nursing assistants and an array of additional professions of all tiers and skill levels to oversee the day-to-day operations of all these facilities. Ball celebrates these hospitals coming to Irvine and the growing workforce brought on by such advancements in local health care. “You have more good jobs that are in the region and therefore you’re gonna have more opportunities for spending and that creates opportunities for our businesses as well,” he said. “So all of that is wonderful.” What about housing? The “ripples” of such a massive hiring wave, Ball said, will be enjoyed by the county at large, but also beg the inevitable question: How will these employers and the surrounding communities address the surging need for affordable housing? “When we think about the needed workforce and where they’re gonna live, this is not just an issue in Irvine,” Ball said.”This is a county-wide issue because they’re gonna be living in different places.” The financial goalpost for homebuyers in the county is ever moving further out. The required household income to buy a median-priced single-family home, which now is considered $1. 44 million, has surged this year to $367,600. Renters are also seeing overall hikes in Orange County. And in Irvine, tenth in the nation’s priciest places to live, renters pay an average of $3,090 monthly. Though these hospitals will bring “a lot of economic investment and growth” to the county, these openings will increase the demand for affordable housing and “exacerbate what is already a significant problem from a housing perspective,” Ball said. People inherently want to live near where they work. When approaching a massive workforce expansion like this, there are two elements community leaders must consider, Ball said. “One, is ensuring we have an adequate workforce for the positions that are being created, and they need to have access to attainable housing.” Even if developers want to quickly respond to this infusion of workforce, building is a lengthy permitting process, Ball said, “making it hard for our builders to really respond to the needs of the market.” One of the things Ball regularly lobbies for is the state loosening its California Environmental Quality Act regulations CEQA requires proposed projects to be evaluated for environmental impacts before being approved, which critics argue leads to delays. But the studies of impacts is necessary, CEQA supporters argue, to make sure communities aren’t overwhelmed by new developments. Ball referenced the recent Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles that scorched thousands of homes and displaced countless residents after the flames erupted in January. “And when that happened? What was the first thing the governor did? He waived compliance with California Environmental Quality Act rules,” Ball said. A housing problem spurred by a medical expansion “may not rise to the level of an emergency like a wildfire,” Ball clarified. “But the dynamics are the same,” and they raise the same question, Ball said: “How can we break down these barriers so that we can build much more effectively?” This question has been “very much on mind” for Walker and the City of Hope team. A little more than 70% of City of Hope’s new employee population lives in Orange County. The rest live in neighboring counties such as San Diego and Riverside, Walker said. “So how can we help these people who would really like to live here and like to live close to their work, but it’s not affordable or practical for them at this time?” One solution on hand, she said, is a $25 million commitment toward workforce housing from RSI Dream Communities, a nonprofit owned by local executive and philanthropist Ron Simon. Potential housing locations are up in the air, but Irvine City Manager Sean Crumby said the city has some ideas. The city recently updated its general plan to change up zoning and guidelines to add capacity for 57, 000 additional units, and Crumby said the boom in health care was front of mind. The majority of the new units will “focus in three major areas of the city,” including near the Irvine Spectrum area, Crumby said. The shopping complex is just two miles away from City of Hope’s campus at 1000 Fivepoint and Hoag’s development off Sand Canyon. “So we are having discussions with City of Hope and looking to identify any way that we can help them in the future,” Crumby said. “I think Hoag is also close enough to the Spectrum area where we can target them as well.” Still, the reverberations of this extensive health-care hiring, Ball said, pose enduring questions on housing to be answered. Rents are rising. Homes are growing increasingly expensive. And local communities must find a way to accommodate their continual growth in a county that is already one of the nation’s most expensive places to live. “It means that the employers are going to have to engage in different strategies related to housing,” Ball said. “If you’re talking about a doctor with a particular skill, you don’t want him having to drive an hour and a half to come in if there’s an emergency procedure.” But still, Ball reiterated, many regions would “give anything” to have these questions to wrestle with.
https://www.ocregister.com/2025/11/23/hospital-openings-in-irvine-mean-lots-of-new-hiring-in-region/