Public Profile
Codornices Medical Center is a 312-bed nonprofit hospital in north Berkeley, California, named for the creek that runs beneath its parking structure. Founded in 1921 as the Berkeley Convalescent Home and reorganized as an acute-care hospital in 1954, it serves the northern East Bay and is the principal teaching affiliate, for general surgery, of a medical school across the bay whose name appears on the hospital’s letterhead in a smaller typeface than the hospital’s own.
The hospital is known within the region for the thoroughness of its internal review. Its peer review committee meets weekly and has, on several documented occasions, continued to review a matter after the physician concerned had retired. Its ethics committee maintains a waiting list. Its patient-safety reporting system, adopted in 2017, accepts reports in eleven categories, the eleventh of which, “other, with explanation,” accounts for 61 percent of submissions. The hospital has described this distribution as “the system working.”
Since 2019 the hospital has leased a Halsted robotic surgical system from Meridian Surgical Technologies at an annual cost of $2.4 million. On Oct. 13, 2026, the system was dismissed from a gallbladder removal in progress by Dr. Everett Lindqvist, a general surgeon on staff since 2006, who completed the procedure by unassisted reasoning. The hospital convened a peer review, which is ongoing. Its chief medical officer is Dr. Howard Aldana.
Articles
- Surgeon Dismisses Robot Midway Through Operation, Vowing to Finish With ‘Pure Artisanal Thinking’ — site of the procedure; convened a peer review that has not yet reached the relevant portion of the record
Articles
- Surgeon Dismisses Robot Midway Through Operation, Vowing to Finish With 'Pure Artisanal Thinking' — The remaining 112 minutes were narrated aloud by Dr. Lindqvist, including several decisions he described as 'not strictly necessary, but mine.'