Newspaper heiress and philanthropist Elisabeth Mills Reid, along with the Rev. Neptune 1908 –– Blood William Gallwey of the Episcopal Church of St. Matthew and a young doctor, W.C. Chidester, pledged the money for a small San Mateo hospital dedicated in 1908.

1909 –– The facility could care for 24 patients with 24 nurses on staff. Mills-Peninsula currently employs approximately 2,500 employees and operates two community health facilities with a total of 403 inpatient beds, including 288 at Peninsula Medical Center.

1954 –– Peninsula Hospital opened in Burlingame on the site of Elisabeth Mills Reid's family home, Mills Mansion for which Millbrae was named. The 153-bed hospital employed 275 staff members.

1985 –– Peninsula Hospital merged with Mills Hospital to become Mills-Peninsula. Today, Peninsula Medical Center in Burlingame provides acute medical and surgical care, and Mills Health Center in San Mateo primarily offers outpatient services.

1996 –– Mills-Peninsula joined Sutter Health, a not-for-profit system of 27 hospitals in Northern and Central California.

2006 –– Groundbreaking ceremony held for Mills-Peninsula's new Medical Center. The design calls for 243 beds in all-private rooms that include family sleeping accommodations, an emergency department enlarged by 42 percent and an 809-space parking garage. An attached office building will be dedicated to physician specialists who need to be close to patients in the hospital, such as obstetricians and surgeons.

Each year, 2,200 babies are born at the Mills-Peninsula Family Birth Center, more than at any other hospital in San Mateo County.

Readers of the San Mateo County Times in 2006 named Mills-Peninsula the Best Hospital in San Mateo County for the 14th consecutive year. The Business Journal Publications ranked Mills-Peninsula the Best Place to Work in the Bay Area for the past two years.

Additionally, Mills-Peninsula recently has received the following awards and honors:

• Recognized as one of the top eight hospitals in the state for quality of cardiovascular surgery programs by the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.



• Awarded stroke center certification by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, an independent, non-profit hospital evaluating organization.



• Named the only Center of Excellence for Bariatric Surgery on the San Francisco Peninsula by the American Society of Bariatric Surgery.



• Mills-Peninsula's Family Birth Center ranked first on the Peninsula and seventh in the state in a University of California, Davis, Lactation Center report examining the rates at which new mothers nursed newborns and received breastfeeding support during their hospital stay.



• Bay Area Parent readers voted Mills-Peninsula No. 1 in the Best Hospital and Medical Center category in the magazine's annual survey.

Mills-Peninsula is on the cutting edge of health care technology as demonstrated by the introduction in May of the first community-based full-digital mammography available on the Peninsula and a plan to convert to electronic health records by late 2007.

Mills-Peninsula's Dorothy E. Schneider Cancer Center exceeds national benchmarks for five major cancers, resulting in longer life spans following treatment at the Center. Additionally, 70 percent of breast cancers detected at Mills-Peninsula are at stage 0 or stage 1, when they are the most curable.

Mills-Peninsula physicians and clinicians routinely contribute to world-class health care research. Elliott Main, M.D., recently led a study of 41,000 births to first-time mothers at Mills-Peninsula and 19 Sutter Health hospitals to discover practices that contribute to unnecessary Caesarean-section deliveries.

Barry Sheppard, M.D., of the Dorothy E. Schneider Cancer Center, recently participated in the International Early Lung Cancer Action Project. Project findings reveal that women with a history of smoking are more likely than men to develop lung cancer but are more likely to survive once diagnosed.

In 2006, Mills-Peninsula Health Services Community Benefit Grant Program awarded $70,000 in grants to eight nonprofit community groups in San Mateo County.

In 2005, Mills-Peninsula provided community benefits, including special health programs and charity care, totaling $57 million.
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