Community Regional Medical Center’s
Century of Commitment to the Valley

From our modest beginning in 1897 — when Fresno physicians formed a private hospital by joining forces with Celia Burnett, the proprietor of an already successful boarding house — to our recent completion of a regional medical center, Community Regional’s rich history spans a century of commitment to the Central Valley and its residents.

Within a decade of opening, Burnett Sanitarium had outgrown the former boarding house and built a three-story building at the corner of Fresno and S streets. The hospital expanded in 1916 into the five-story Burnett Annex that still stands on Community Regional’s 58-acre downtown campus. By then, the hospital had earned a reputation as one of the most modern hospitals on the West Coast, a reputation that has been revived today with technology such as two 64-slice CT scanners that provide head-to-toe views within five seconds and the CyberKnife Gen 4® technology that precisely attacks tumors with tiny multiple beams of radiation, eliminating the need for anesthesia and a hospital stay.

In 1945, the non-profit corporation that would become Community Medical Centers purchased Burnett Sanitarium and renamed it Fresno Community Hospital. The hospital continued expanding in 1959, opening a 204-bed, five-story building, and then adding another 69 beds in 1963. By 1972, Fresno Community’s 10-story tower was complete.

Fresno City Council paved the way for our current campus in 1995, approving development of Community Regional Medical Center. The next year a merger with Fresno County was established and Community assumed management for Valley Medical Center, renamed it University Medical Center (UMC), and began making plans to eventually consolidate most services into one hospital.

Construction on the regional medical center began in 2000 and was aided by a $10 million gift in 2003 from Table Mountain Rancheria. Much of that helped build the trauma and critical care building (TCCB). The TCCB tower was completed in 2004 and our first patients were treated in new cardiac catheterization labs. The next year, the emergency department moved to the first floor of the new building becoming the largest emergency department in California, covering the equivalent of a football field.

Community Regional marked many firsts after that, becoming the first in the world to offer the new CyberKnife Gen4® technology. In 2007, the dedicated neurosciences unit was the first in the Valley to use some of the most advanced neurosurgical equipment available anywhere, including StealthStation surgical image guidance, an integrated operating microscope, intra-operative ultrasound, the Ceretom portable head CT, and the O-arm intra-operative spinal CT imaging system. 

In 2007, Community made good on promises made a decade before to the county and transitioned all the acute services from UMC – including the burn and Level 1 trauma centers – to the downtown campus. UCSF Fresno Medical Education Program residents and faculty relocated, as well, to the regional medical center. With the move, UMC closed its emergency department. Community also remodeled and added a 50-bed cardiac unit in 2008.

Community Regional added a Level III neonatal intensive care unit in 2008, broke ground on the new 79,534-square-foot Deran Koligian Ambulatory Care Center, a four story medical office building, and cleared ground for construction of Terry’s House at the corner of Fresno and R streets. In early 2009, a new 1,500 stall parking garage also was completed.

Today, after many purchases, mergers, alliances and name changes, our downtown hospital has truly become a regional academic medical center, establishing and maintaining numerous fellowship programs including most recently – cardiology and pulmonary medicine – and maintaining close affiliation with training top specialists, offering world-class health care with state-of-the art technology and advanced treatment.