RC104 JanFeb2023 - Magazine - Page 13
L to R: The Trillium Health Partners long-term redevelopment project includes the new Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital; The six-storey Lakeridge
Gardens Long-Term Care facility in Ajax, Ont. was built in in under 18 months; Michael Lindsay, president and CEO, Infrastructure Ontario.
rently has numerous healthcare facilities in the pipeline,
including the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Integrated Treatment Centre, the New Ottawa Civic Hospital,
Quinte Health Centre, the Stevenson Memorial Hospital
redevelopment, and the Kingston General Hospital redevelopment, “and I haven’t even put on that list the Kemptville Correctional Facility and a couple of others, plus all
the federal government is doing with every building in
downtown Ottawa,” he says.
As healthcare projects continue to get bigger in scope,
Lindsay thinks they are beginning to experience some of
the same risk characteristics seen in large linear projects,
such as highways and transit.
“It’s no longer just a greenfield parcel of land,” he
says. “Although we have a few of those in the pipeline,
it’s far more brownfield rehabilitation, refurbishment,
reconstruction as operations are going on. Not only are
they massive hospital projects, but they sit face-to-face
with massive transit investments that are planned, so the
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interactive effect of those works happening in the same
corridor is new and novel. So, there’s a whole bunch of
those things that continue to condition the way in which
we think about what it is we must do within the industry
to deliver.”
Finally, another pandemic-related trend Lindsay sees
when it comes to building healthcare facilities is the sector’s
thinking around long-term care (LTC) homes and how they
can be part of “a continuum of care or campus of care.”
“We’ve built those four rapid-build LTC facilities in
partnership with hospitals. And, they are long-term
care beds, but they’re also acute-care beds. And we
were certain to ensure the behavioural units and dialysis units were a part of these LTC facilities, because
the ability to take patients that are otherwise occupying hospital beds and to put them into proximate LTC
facilities that allow for some synergies and respective
operations cost, especially around clinical staff, is
really powerful.”
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