When Denver Health’s newest outpatient center opens late next month, it will bear the name of the former mayor whom hospital leaders credit with keeping the city’s public health system afloat.
The 75,000-square-foot Wellington E. Webb Center for Primary Care – on the edge of the hospital campus – will include a dental clinic, pediatric and adult care and an outpatient pharmacy.
In addition to putting Webb’s name on the building, the Denver Health Foundation is launching a $1.5 million endowment that will also bear the former mayor’s name.
The Wellington E. Webb Endowment for Community Health will provide money for research in the areas of access to care, said Paula Herzmark, executive director of the Denver Health Foundation.
Dr. Patricia Gabow, Denver Health’s chief executive, said the hospital board wanted to honor Webb for “the many courageous and visionary things the mayor did for Denver Health.”
Chief among those was letting Denver Health become a independent, quasi- governmental agency.
Until 1997, what is now the Denver Health and Hospital Authority was just another city department. It was running about $38 million in the red.
Gabow believed the hospital and its clinics could operate more efficiently if they were free of government rules and red tape, and she persuaded then-Mayor Webb to go along with the plan.
A political leader willing to give up such a huge chunk of territory – in this case, the second-largest city department – is a remarkable thing, Herzmark said.
For Webb, the decision made sense then, and still does.
“The choice between a health authority with a public mission or a bankrupt hospital is an easy choice to make,” he said.
Webb, who called himself “a public hospital baby,” and whose wife, Wilma, was born at the hospital known then as Denver General, said the honor was “very humbling.”
