RC104 JanFeb2023 - Magazine - Page 24
TOP100 PROJECTS
JUST ON TIME
Despite numerous obstacles,
Royal Inland Hospital’s
new patient care tower was
delivered on time
by John Tenpenny
HEN IT COMES TO dealing with a pandemic, hospitals play a vital role. When the construction
of a healthcare facility occurs during that
same pandemic, the policies and collaboration
between parties become paramount in making
sure that the project is completed on time, on
budget, and safely.
Completed in July 2022, the Phil & Jennie Gaglardi
Tower at Royal Inland Hospital (RIH) serves residents in
Kamloops, but just as importantly, the surrounding region
as well.
“Royal Inland is an acute care site that services Kamloops, but also all of the Thompson Cariboo Shuswap
area—all of the smaller towns that feed into it,” says Michael Morton, project owner Interior Health’s (IH) director
of major capital projects. “The main need for this [project]
was an update to meet the clinical standard of care, giving
residents improved access to healthcare services in a modern, state-of-the-art facility.”
Designed with direct input from local health-care workers, the nine-storey tower helps streamline the way people
access services in the hospital. There is one main entrance
and a spacious facility that will allow staff to provide
care in a space designed to modern standards. The tower
includes single-patient rooms with their own washrooms,
large spaces for families to gather and the ability for Indigenous smudging practices to occur in patient rooms.
There are also new operating rooms and surgical services suites, more beds, medical surgical inpatient units,
respiratory therapy services and a new rooftop helipad
provides a more direct access to trauma care for patients
that arrive at the hospital via helicopter..
As well, the tower includes a mental-health and
substance-use inpatient unit, child and adolescent mental-health services, obstetrical services, labour, delivery
and a neo-natal intensive-care unit, a first-floor atrium and
patient registration area.
EllisDon was selected by IH in 2018 to design, build,
partially finance and maintain the tower in a public-private partnership (P3). Facilities maintenance at RIH has
transitioned to EllisDon Facilities Services Inc., which will
provide maintenance services at RIH for 30 years.
W
John Tenpenny is the
editor of ReNew Canada.
john@actualmedia.ca
24 RENEW CANADA — JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023
Patience required
You can forgive Jordan Highton for thinking he was living in different times.
EllisDon’s senior superintendent on the project, who
oversaw up to 500 workers on site at any time, says it
wasn’t just the pandemic that affected the project, but also
natural disasters.
“This project was largely built during the pandemic,
which wasn’t unique, but what made it unique was not
only did we have the pandemic, but we also had two seasons of wildfires in Kamloops and then flooding as well.
It was almost Biblical, in that we had fires, floods and the
pandemic.”
The creation of an employee mapping system was key
to knowing how workers were housed and with whom,
RENEWCANADA.NET
