Sneak peek at Stanton
Examples of rooms built to-scale for medical practitioners to review
Shane Magee
Northern News Services
Monday, February 8, 2016
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Health-care workers have been touring life-size examples of several rooms planned for the new Stanton Territorial Hospital as the design of the building gets revised.
The rooms, roughed-in with drywall and printed diagrams showing where equipment or outlets may go, are on the second floor of Centre Ice Plaza.
"We are so excited for this new building and the 100 single-patient rooms," said Jeannie Dhaliwal, who was leading a tour of the mock-ups Thursday for reporters.
The hospital will be more than double the size of the existing facility, in part because of rooms designed for just one patient instead of shared rooms.
Dhaliwal, the health and social services director of Stanton redevelopment, said roughly 100 people from various hospital departments had already come through Centre Ice Plaza.
Mock-ups of 14 different types of rooms is a requirement in the project agreement between Boreal and the GNWT. The mock-ups will soon be torn down and replaced with other types of rooms as the design of the interior layout of the building continues.
Laurie Dufresne, who works in the hospital's lab, said the design team is seeking input from hospital workers.
"It looks good," she said Thursday evening at a public meeting to ask questions about the project.
Employees have given input on things like how high a work bench should be - whether the lab worker would be sitting or standing to do certain tests - and said that input has meant altered designs to better suit the work that will actually be done.
"They've been great about listening to our concerns," she said.
Shams Atroun said he attended the public meeting Thursday because he was curious about the number of beds increasing from 80 to 100.
The existing hospital has 67 inpatient beds and 13 extended care beds. The new facility will only have inpatient beds. A separate building for extended care with 18 beds is expected to be built but a cost and location have not been
revealed yet.
After talking with the construction and government representatives at the meeting, Atroun said he got a satisfactory answer. He was impressed with the aesthetics of the building.
"It's not just a hospital, it's a piece of art," Atroun said.
The new hospital will be double the size of the existing one - 27,500 square metres versus 13,300 square metres because of different infection control standards as well as new rooms and expansions of various departments, said Mike Burns, assistant deputy minister of the Department of Public Works
and Services.
It includes new types of rooms that aren't in the existing facility, such as airborne isolation rooms.
Those would be used for someone with tuberculous, for example. When not needed for isolation, the rooms - at least one per floor - will be used for regular patients.
Mothers who want to use a birthing tub to give birth will have that chance in three of the maternity rooms, based on current plans.
The current hospital doesn't have such tubs. Plans show those rooms would still have beds.
Departments that will see a significant expansion include the emergency room and psychiatric unit.
The psychiatric unit, on the third floor, will have 21 beds and has about doubled the number of beds in the existing hospital.
Fve of the beds will be for higher levels of care.
The psychiatric unit will have access to a rooftop patio which will have barriers to prevent patients from getting to the edge of the roof, according to GNWT spokesperson Andrew Livingstone.
Boreal Health Partnership, a consortium that won a bid process, is financing, designing and building the facility, which it will maintain for 30 years.
The hospital will cost $350 million to build and it is expected to be staffed and functional by December 2018.
The early phases of construction, including clearing and blasting the site, are on schedule, reporters were told Thursday.
"It's going well," said Burns.
