Palomar Health Foundation receives $1 million donation

ESCONDIDO – The Palomar Health Foundation received a $1 million leading gift for a state-of-the-art conference center at Palomar Medical Center Escondido. Envisioned as a place dedicated to continued learning where clinicians inside and outside the hospital system share information and promote excellence in medicine, the center is intended to host medical conferences and physician symposiums.

Palomar Health’s leadership and staff celebrated the donor, Bonsall resident Tom Oeschger, his fiancée Tami Eshelman, and daughters Julie and Cameron Eshelman, inside the future conference center on July 20. To commemorate the generous gift, and in tribute to Oeschger’s background as an architectural engineer, the family was presented with an engraved steel beam from the hospital’s construction.

“This new state-of-the-art conference center is perfectly located here,” said Board of Directors Member Douglas Moir, MD, FACC. “PalomarMedical Center Escondido has national recognition for our innovation in design, healing environment, and technological advances that support quality care. This new learning center will support our continued commitment to education and innovation and serve our community well.”

As a trained architectural engineer, Oeschger says the idea of making a transformative gift to build a technologically advanced conference center that will facilitate the transfer of medical training and information between physicians, nurses and other clinicians and caregivers had appeal.

“Information is nothing until you get it in the hands of the right people, then it is something,” Oeschger said.

“We are deeply appreciative of this generous gift and the support of Tom and his family,” said Bob Hemker, CEO Palomar Health. “Their philanthropy shows their passion for ensuring that we have the best-trained clinicians delivering the highest quality of care for our community – today and into the future.”

Oeschger made the donation in honor of his parents, Frank and Eileen Oeschger, without whom, Oeschger says, the donation would not be possible.