Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital

The 465-bed Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital is the largest medical facility on the California coast between Los Angeles and the San Francisco bay area. The hospital dates back to 1888, when a group of local citizens began raising funds to build a "cottage-style" hospital for the growing community. Their original plans called for a complex in which each medical specialty would be housed in a separate bungalow. Even then, however, such a decentralized plan was too costly, so work began instead on a single cottage for all hospital departments. The first Cottage Hospital opened in 1891, with 25 beds housed in a two story Victorian building. Now a hugh medical complex employing some 1,500 people, the hospital continues to be called "Cottage" after the original home-like building. Rodney J. Lamb has been Hospital Administrator for the last 30 years.