Dr. Kurt Ransohoff, CEO of Sansum Clinic, and Warner Thomas, president and CEO of Sutter Health, celebrated their new partnership on Friday — a move 16 years in the making. 

The partnership is the first step in an integration process that will continue over the next several years.

Already, Sutter has helped fund three new operating rooms at Sansum’s Foothill Surgery Center. The new operating rooms are expected to open in November.

Together, the two health organizations want to focus on advancing Sansum’s surgery center with state-of-the-art equipment, bring an imaging center dedicated to women’s health, and expand access to primary and specialty care. 

Sansum began thinking about having a partnership with another health organization in 2007, and Sutter was the first organization it approached.

However, when the 2008 recession began, dreams of partnerships were put on hold until 2022, when Sansum decided to revisit the possibility. 

“It felt like fate or destiny to have Sutter be thinking about the world in the way that complemented the way we saw it,” Ransohoff said during a press conference on Friday. “It took 50 years for our clinics to find the moment to come together, and it was worth the wait.”

The partnership also aims to create new jobs by adding physicians in order to extend services. Thomas emphasized that the partnership will allow patients to get more localized care.

“If we can take care of people local, close to their home, then that’s what we want to do,” Thomas said. “Our commitment is to help you expand services, help you take care of more folks in your community.”

Ransohoff said that the two organizations hope the partnership will help with recruiting new employees. By attaching the Sutter name, the clinic hopes to be able to attract more employees who wish to work for Sutter. 

Thomas said on Friday that Sutter plans to expand its graduate medical education programs over the next several years. The graduate programs previously trained 250 physicians and the goal is to train 900 in the next few years.

“Partnering with Sansum, they’ll be able to recruit out of these training programs,” Thomas said. “We’ll be looking for folks that come out of Santa Barbara to recruit into our training programs so we can potentially have them return home.”

Along with Ransohoff and Thomas, the ribbon-cutting included state Assemblyman Gregg Hart, Santa Barbara County Supervisor Das Williams, Dr. Conrad Vial and Dr. David Raphael. 

Hart spoke about how the partnership between Sansum and Sutter will allow for better care for the Santa Barbara community and for the organization to be better prepared for changes in health care.

“The organization will just be stronger and more able to meet the challenges of the future health care needs of our community,” Hart said.

Vial, vice president at Sutter Health and president of the Sutter Health Network, spoke about what it took to make the partnership happen.

“There’s a tremendous amount of energy that is being invested, and where there’s energy of that type being invested, there’s a lot of hope,” Vial said. “And hope is what we need. Hope isn’t a plan, but plans don’t really work without hope energizing them.”