Conrad Prebys considers himself a lucky man. A native of South Bend, Ind., he was raised in a working-class neighborhood where most of the residents worked in local factories.
He was the first of five brothers to graduate from Indiana University, and in 1965, he moved to San Diego with “” as he tells friends “” less than $500 and the clothes on his back. He has lived in Point Loma for the last 35 years.
Now president of Progress Construction and Management Company, an East County real estate and development company, he owns and manages close to 6,000 apartments, condominiums and houses as well as several storage facilities in San Diego County.
“I have been very blessed in San Diego,” Prebys said. “I started as an ‘on your lot’ builder. I gradually got into commercial and apartments and I accumulated a decent estate. When I realized that I have fewer birthdays ahead of me than behind me, it was time to make plans.”
He began thinking about forming a charitable foundation that would benefit the community after he had passed on. Forming such a foundation, however, has taken longer than expected, he said.
“In the meantime, I discovered it’s a lot more fun to do some of this giving while I’m alive and can see the benefits of my donations,” Prebys said. “I’ve been extremely thrilled with the results.”
Recently he answered the call for assistance from Scripps Mercy Hospital by donating $10 million to support the hospital’s emergency department and level one trauma services expansion project, the largest donation in the not-for-profit hospital’s 116-year history. The previous largest donation made to Scripps Mercy Hospital was $1.7 million given by Tom Sefton in 1996.
“A lot of times people will give to a hospital because they’ve had their care here or a family member had, but in this case it was more of us educating him,” said Mary Braunwarth, executive director of Mercy Hospital Foundation.
Braunwarth approached Prebys about making a donation to the hospital, as he was already known for his generous philanthropic gifts to the Boys and Girls Clubs of East County, the San Diego Opera and the Old Globe.
She explained to Prebys that as a Point Loma resident, if there was an emergency, Scripps Mercy would be the hospital he would go to, which could be a problem based on the hospital’s already overcrowded emergency department and the possible move of emergency services at the UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest to the Thornton Hospital in La Jolla.
“Mercy will be the only hospital serving all people south of [Interstate] 8,” Prebys said.
The emergency department currently includes 24 beds (two for trauma care) and is operating beyond full capacity. It is one of the busiest emergency departments and trauma centers in the county, with more than 50,000 emergency patients and 2,200 trauma patients treated in 2005.
Despite being one of the busiest hospitals in the county, the hospital is on bypass (when the hospital closes its emergency department to new patients) for an average of an hour per day, which is among the lowest in all of San Diego County and for similar-sized hospitals, said Davis Cracroft, emergency physician and medical director for Scripps Mercy Hospital.
“We do a good job of staying off bypass and accepting those patients that we feel a responsibility to accept,” Cracroft said. “We’re almost never on trauma bypass. We try to keep our doors open to acutely injured patients, just because it’s difficult for them to go anywhere else. Generally, we work really hard to keep our hospital open.”
Prebys’ donation will help to nearly double the size of the hospital’s emergency department and trauma center, adding another 19 beds, which should solve the current problem of overcrowding, said Cracroft.
However, if UCSD does go ahead with plans to transfer its emergency services to La Jolla, Scripps Mercy could once again be overcrowded.
“We would have to add more capacity to our ER and more capacity to our hospital, and right now, from a space standpoint and from an economic standpoint, Scripps has committed about as much as we can to expanding our ER,” Cracroft said. “Part of the problem is we don’t have a lot of space and property to expand into.”
According to Braunwarth, there have been studies in the community on the impact of the closure of UCSD’s emergency services in the area that have determined there probably will not be a major impact.
“Well, we don’t really work under ‘probably’ very well. We just know that we see the population growth and we see the increase in the number of uninsured folks in the community, and emergency departments take everybody who comes through the door, regardless of their ability to pay,” Braunwarth continued. “At this point, there’s a lot of concern that we have about that potential closure.”
Cracroft agreed that there is concern and stress regarding UCSD’s possible move.
“I think UCSD has always been a good partner in this community, and hopefully that will stay the same,” he said. “Totally leaving from an emergency care standpoint is something that is not realistic and not fair to our relationship and to the patients of this community.”
According to Braunwarth, the Scripps Mercy $40 million expansion project has been in the works for almost two years and is currently scheduled to be open in the third quarter of 2009.
UCSD plans to have its services transferred to the La Jolla facility by 2025.
Prebys said that while he has no plans for future donations, he does keep himself aware of the needs in the county.
“If something strikes me, I’ll move,” Prebys said. “I live life rather accidentally, and it’s worked out very successfully for me.”