• Visitors get a peek inside some of the rooms during...
    Visitors get a peek inside some of the rooms during the opening of the new Irvine health center on Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025. Called the first all-electric hospital in the United States, the building is designed to lower carbon emissions by moving away from natural gas. The event featured tours of the 144-bed facility, a yoga class, food trucks and face painters. (Photo by Michael Goulding, Contributing Photographer)

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Visitors get a peek inside some of the rooms during the opening of the new Irvine health center on Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025. Called the first all-electric hospital in the United States, the building is designed to lower carbon emissions by moving away from natural gas. The event featured tours of the 144-bed facility, a yoga class, food trucks and face painters. (Photo by Michael Goulding, Contributing Photographer)

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UC Irvine invited the local community into its new hospital in town over the weekend for a look around before anyone may need its many services.

Set to open Dec. 10, the new UCI Health–Irvine medical center will have 144 beds, an emergency room, a floor of operating rooms the length of three football fields and all the offerings of a state-of-the-art hospital. Though on the edge of the UCI campus off Jamboree Road, it is a hospital for serving the general Orange County community.

A hospital has been envisioned at the campus since its opening, though an opportunity to purchase Orange County General Hospital in Orange for $1 led first to the creation there of UCI Medical Center in the 1960s, now to be called UCI Health–Orange.

“Us coming back here is really the fulfillment of a promise made to this area when the university was established and the medical school was established,” said Jess Langerud, principal project manager with UCI, who has been managing the construction of the new seven-story facility. “To have a medical center on the campus of UCI. So we are finally fulfilling that promise; it is a bit of a homecoming.”

Visitors on Saturday toured the rooms and some of the specialty areas, such as radiology, and met the staff members who have been preparing the 350,000-square-foot facility for its upcoming opening.

UCI officials also showcased the hospital’s power system, which makes it the first all-electric hospital in the nation.

The hospital completes the Irvine medical campus. Last year, UCI Health opened the Joe C. Wen & Family Center for Advanced Care and the Center for Children’s Health and the UCI Health Center for Autism & Neurodevelopmental Disorders. The campus also includes the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Ambulatory Care.

UCI Health–Irvine will be the sixth hospital in the University of California academic health system. The hospital will provide services for a range of specialties, including cancer, cardiology, digestive health, neurology and orthopedics, with an academic medicine model. Since the Orange hospital was opened, the university has added on top of its medical school, schools of nursing, pharmacy and others.

“This is here to support all of that,” Langerud said of the new Irvine hospital, “to further augment the academic medicine, research medicine that UCI offers to Orange County and its community.”