College - Author 1
College of Architecture and Environmental Design
Department - Author 1
Construction Management Department
Degree Name - Author 1
BS in Construction Management
Date
5-2026
Primary Advisor/Subject Matter Expert (SME)
Shantanu Kumar, College of Architecture and Environmental Design, Construction Management Department
Abstract/Summary
Every hospital in California must be seismically compliant by 2030 under Senate Bill 1953, which is enforced by the Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI). HCAI approves and inspects all hospital construction in the state, and its authority reaches into the field, so a contractor cannot simply build to an approved drawing the way it would on a commercial job. This paper explains how that approval system governs the work, written for construction professionals entering hospital work in California whose experience to that point has been commercial. It uses the ZSFG Building 5 Voluntary Seismic Upgrade, a 1976 trauma center being retrofit while it stays open, delivered under a Construction Manager General Contractor contract alongside several other projects in the same building. Drawing on interviews with the project team and the project's own permits and procedures, the central finding is that the hard part is not the structural work but the approval environment around it. Approval is granted location by location, so one scope touching more than two hundred areas becomes more than two hundred separate approvals, each with its own containment, life safety plan, long list of reviewers, and HCAI sign off. Success depends less on how the structural work is built than on how well the contractor manages the documents that release each location.
URL: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cmsp/966