Providence Health Care announced plans April 13 to build a $1 billion hospital on False Creek Flats to replace the 120-year-old St. Paul’s Hospital on Burrard Street.
The move caps weeks of speculation that a renewed push to relocate the downtown Vancouver hospital was in the works.
The million-square-foot campus set to be built on 18.5 acres behind Pacific Central Station would be nearly three times larger than the current facility, which is on about 6.5 acres.
Construction could start by 2017 with an opening set for 2022.
Providence CEO Dianne Doyle told Business in Vancouver after the announcement that the previous $850 million plan to upgrade the current hospital would have only been a partial upgrade and would have been much more difficult to finance.
The provincial government is keeping its 2012 commitment to pump $500 million into an upgraded hospital for Vancouver but, under the new arrangement, Providence expects that it will also be able to generate about $500 million from either leasing or selling the Burrard Street site.
If the hospital stayed on the Burrard Street site, Providence would not be able to generate that $500 million from its real estate assets and it would likely have taken up to 15 years to be able to come up with the $350 million.
“We want to make sure that whatever the services are that the West End needs, it is going to be provided by the system,” Doyle said.
When the concept of a hospital on False Creek Flats was first proposed around 2008, Doyle told BIV that there would still be a centre at the Burrard Street site for “urgent” health care centre needs.
That plan has changed.
“We’re not going to presuppose what [West End residents] need,” Doyle said. “In the past we talked about urgent care [on the Burrard Street site]. That may not be the right solution and there may or may not be a need to have anything on that site.”
Building a hospital from scratch means that the buildings themselves will be more efficient in terms of energy use and maintenance. It also means that the entire facility will be designed with patient flow in mind.
“We’ll be able to reduce the amount of walking and movement of patients that staff currently every day are faced with,” she said.
The new hospital will also provide a higher quality of care given that almost all of its 700 beds will be single-room beds. About 80% of the Burrard Street site’s 435 beds are currently in multi-bed rooms.
More single-bed rooms also reduces the amount of patient movement necessary.
Doyle explained that patients are often moved at the Burrard Street site because staff want to keep them from contracting an illness from a roommate.
Critics of the move, such as Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert, tweeted about how the Stanley Cup riots in 2011 demonstrated why the dense downtown peninsula needs an emergency room.
Roads were closed that night to inhibit movement out of the downtown core, Herbert said.
While there is no plan for an emergency room at the Burrard Street site, Providence’s Neil McConnell, who is the project leader for the St. Paul’s Hospital redevelopment, told BIV that health care services may continue at the Burrard Street site.
“Possibly there will be a clinic on the St. Paul’s site,” he said. “We haven’t reached that determination yet because we haven’t had the right conversation.”
