Lakeview Hospital at 50: How Bountiful’s Hillside Hospital Got Its Start
Lakeview Hospital on the Bountiful bench marked 50 years this month. The hospital was dedicated on Sept. 18, 1976, and it has served south Davis County from the same hillside site at 630 Medical Drive ever since. Here’s how it came to be, drawn from the hospital’s published history.
Why Bountiful needed a second hospital
By the early 1970s, Davis County was the fastest-growing county in Utah, and South Davis Community Hospital, built in 1961 and expanded in 1964, couldn’t keep up. Many residents were driving to Salt Lake City or Ogden for hospital care. Local leaders agreed a new hospital was needed, but federal Hill-Burton construction funds dried up just before plans came together, and no local group stepped in to pay for it.
That’s when Dr. Thomas Frist Sr., founder of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), bought the site. Ground was broken on Aug. 20, 1974, in what were then orchards on the Bountiful slope. The original building cost $8 million and covered 150,000 square feet.
How it got the name “Lakeview”
According to the hospital’s account, the name came on a March 1975 evening during construction. Frist and a small group rode up to the unfinished fourth floor, where one window looked out at the Great Salt Lake and another at the Wasatch Mountains. Watching the sunset over the lake, Frist reportedly settled on the name right there.
Then and now
When it opened in 1976, Lakeview had 128 beds, including eight intensive coronary beds, and a starting medical staff of 45 active physicians, 19 courtesy physicians and 12 dentists. Over the decades it expanded its emergency room, radiology and surgery suites, added birthing rooms, refreshed its exterior in 2004, and opened the Lakeview Medical Arts Building next door in November 2005.
Today it is a 128-bed, 210,000-square-foot acute care hospital with more than 200 physicians across 25-plus specialties, part of MountainStar Healthcare.
For more on the city’s history and landmarks, visit our Bountiful community guide, and keep up with local stories on the Davis County news page.
