Your visit

As a patient at Community Hospital, your needs come first. As a hospital, our goal is to exceed your expectations. Community Hospital is designed to help you get well as quickly as possible and to provide unparalleled service, quality, value, and safety for you, your family members, and visitors.

We are fully licensed and accredited to assure that you receive the highest quality of care possible. We use state-of-the-art equipment. And our more than 2,085 employees, 912 volunteers, and 220 physicians at Community Hospital are dedicated to serving you.

We believe:

• Patients come first.
• Our employees, medical staff, and volunteers are our most important organizational resource.
• Broad community participation in our programs is essential.
• An atmosphere of support and openness encourages innovation and, inherently, higher quality.
• Quality care must be affordable.
• We must be a significant, positive force in our community.
• Caring is as important as technology to healthcare excellence.
• Facilities should be designed to enhance the healing process.
• Preserving and enhancing the environment is fundamental.
• Providing financial resources sufficient to meet the present and future healthcare needs of our community is paramount.

Things You Should Know

Smoking

Community Hospital is a smoke-free environment. Patients are not allowed to smoke. Help is available to stop smoking. Please ask your nurse for assistance. Visitors may smoke only in their cars.

Transportation

Parking

Spaces for patients are located closest to the hospital, as well as in the garage.

Handicapped access spaces are close to the hospital, as well as near the elevators in the garage. If you need help parking, a Security staff member is available to assist you. A courtesy shuttle is also available to bring you from the parking lot to the hospital entrance.

Taxi

The Auxiliary Reception Desk or Security can help you call for a taxi.

Bus Schedules

Bus schedules are available at the Auxiliary Reception Desk. For direct assistance, call Monterey-Salinas Transit at (831) 899-2555.

Visitor Information

Visiting guidelines are created for patients at Community Hospital to receive friends and family, but also to provide for rest and quiet during recuperation. These visiting guidelines include:

1. Quiet time is all the time. Please be as quiet as possible in the corridors and while visiting in the patient’s room.
2. If you have a cold or feel ill, do not visit.
3. Please do not leave children unattended anywhere in the hospital. Parents are responsible for supervising and keeping children quiet while in the hospital.
4. Food and beverages may be brought to the hospital for patient consumption only if it has been arranged with your nurse and is allowed in the diet prescribed by your doctor. Please check first.
5. All visitors must check at the nurse’s station before visiting a patient.
6. Only two visitors at a time are permitted.
7. Visitors are expected to leave by 9 p.m.

Visiting Hours

Visiting is permitted throughout the day. The exceptions are:

• Garden Pavilion (Behavioral Health Services). All visitors to Garden Pavilion must call extension 4775 to obtain permission to visit before going to the unit. Visitors are allowed only during the following times:
  • Monday-Friday: Noon to 1 p.m. and 5:30 to 7 p.m.
  • Saturday, Sunday, and holidays: Noon to 1 p.m. and 3 to 7 p.m.
• Outpatient Surgery Center. Only one visitor at a time is permitted with permission of the charge nurse, 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
• Short Stay Unit. 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.

When Friends and Family Call

Your stay at the hospital is confidential. The operator and Reception Desk volunteers will direct calls and visitors to your room only if a person knows your name. Nursing staff will screen calls if the person is asking for more information about you and your condition.

You may prefer to have no information given out to callers or visitors. If you choose “no information status,” absolutely no information will be provided to anyone, not even your name or presence in the hospital. The “no information status” includes even your family members and friends, unless you choose to inform them yourself. The hospital is not able to screen callers and visitors.

Food, Gifts, Stamps & Phones

Fountain Court Café

The Fountain Court Café is open for meals and beverages:

• Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Take-out service is also available except from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
• Saturday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
• Sundays and holidays, 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. (closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day but free coff ee and Danish is available between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.)

The coffee cart near the Outpatient Surgery Center is open Monday through Friday from 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday from 7:30 a.m. to noon; and closed on Sunday. Coffee (self-serve) is available everyday from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. from the Fountain Court .

Gift Shop

The Gift Shop is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and weekends from 1 to 4 p.m. Postage stamps, mail service. Postage stamps are available in limited quantity at the Gift Shop. Deposit outgoing mail with correct postage at the Auxiliary Reception Desk in the main lobby.

Telephones

Visitors can make local and calling-card calls from the phones in waiting areas. A pay phone is located on the main floor near the Gift Shop.