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	Designed by famed architect I.M. Pei, the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center will be the most advanced hospital in the West.



	In playrooms surronding this cylindrical aquarium, pediatric patients and their families will interact with therapists at Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA.

Targeting Your Support: Partnership for Care

The UCLA Fund allows you to direct your annual gift to a variety of campus areas, providing unrestricted support for outstanding students, faculty and programs. But with so much exciting research, teaching and outreach taking place at UCLA, it can be hard to know everything that’s going on.

Targeting Your Support highlights areas of campus that you may wish to support. In this issue, we focus on the UCLA Partnership for Care, and the ways this program is making a world of difference for patients.

Partnership for Care supports compassionate programs that help patients, including People Animal Connection (PAC)

Funding Compassionate Programs

The new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which is scheduled to open for business on June 29, is truly the hospital of the future. The most advanced medical technology in the world is woven into the fabric of the new medical center.

Such technological capability is one critical aspect of outstanding patient care. At UCLA, patients and their families also can count on treatment that is supportive and compassionate. The Partnership for Care program encompasses some of the medical center’s most heart-warming programs.

In the People-Animal Connection (PAC), for example, specially trained dogs and their owners visit hospital patients to help relieve stress and anxiety as well as assist with physical and occupational therapy. “The patients, typically recovering from stroke or brain surgery, don’t just pet the dog – they are working to speed their recovery,” says Amy Peer, a long-time PAC volunteer with her chocolate Labrador retriever, Kobe.

In another part of the hospital, the Child Life/Child Development Services team conducts play therapy for pediatric patients, helping the children understand and cope with issues related to their care. The large, interactive play spaces in the new hospital provide a “reassuring, home-like atmosphere that gives young patients a place to physically heal but also an environment where they can enjoy being children,” explains Mattel Children’s Hospital Physician-in-Chief Dr. Edward R. B. McCabe.

These programs, in addition to social work services, pastoral care, and Tiverton House where patients and their families can stay during prolonged hospital care, make the Partnership for Care a very special initiative.

“I support the UCLA Medical Center because it is a preeminent center for research and innovation,” says Chancellor’s Associate David Vena ’61. “The Partnership for Care fund does wonderful things for patients, and I am also excited about the interdisciplinary programs that the medical center forges with engineering, life sciences and other areas of the university. They produce remarkable developments in medical care, treatment and technology to benefit all of us.”