By Mark Buckshon
Ottawa Construction News staff writer
The Ottawa Hospital has launched A Conversation About Creating Tomorrow, a six-episode exclusive video series bringing the community to the new hospital campus construction site on Carling Avenue.
You can view the first video here and see its transcript below. Cameron Love, president and CEO of The Ottawa Hospital, and Tim Kluke, president and CEO of The Ottawa Hospital Foundation, provide an update on the progress of this transformative project.
Every two weeks, a new episode will highlight an expert who will share how this state-of-the-art facility will reshape healthcare — from research to mental health to patient care.
Tim Kluke: Hi I’m Tim Kluke, president CEO at the Ottawa Hospital Foundation, so excited to bring you here on the new campus development of The Ottawa Hospital. Our $500 million Campaign to Create Tomorrow will help support the building of this new campus and take research to new heights.
I’m joined today by Cameron Love, president and CEO at The Ottawa Hospital, to talk about this one component of how the hospital is reshaping the future of healthcare. So Cam it’s been a while since we’ve been on this site. Can you just give us a sense of what’s happened here over the course of the last year or so?
Cameron Love: Yeah, it’s been it’s been an incredible year of progress. Tim, the first phase of this entire project and you can see it behind me, is the building of the parking garage and we have made tremendous progress over the last year and you can see it coming out of the ground now.
As it comes out of the ground and the reason for building this one first is because the amount of development that comes next is probably 10 times this and we’ve got loads of construction workers that are going to be on site and they need places to park. So as we get the parking garage built, it positions then to support the next phase of development.
Kluke: It is an absolute beehive of activity and now this is the parking garage what we’re seeing behind us but what about the new hospital itself. What’s the plan? What’s the timeline for that?
Love: The new hospital is probably in the range of four to five years to actually build it but it’s done in phases. While we have the parking garage being built we are starting some advanced works projects, which are basically doing things like starting to dig the hole, do the underground services, do the preparation based on scale magnitude of about a 2 million to 2.5 million sq. ft. building.
Those phases will take a year to build so as we dig the hole (and) do the underground services, we will take that period of time, which is about a year, to do all the final designs of the project. Once the designs are done and we have Ministry approvals in place then we will start bringing it up out of the ground, just like you’re seeing with the garage
Kluke: It’s incredible to think it’s going to take a year to dig a hole. So what about some of the design features of the new hospital itself? What are some of those benefits we’re going to see?
Love: Maybe we’ll start at the outside of the building. I think you know it’s interesting in healthcare today the inside of the building is extremely important. So is the outside. When you take a look at a hospital of today, we have every mode of transportation coming, so as we build parking, we’ve got bike, stations we’ve got pathways for walking, for bikes.
We’ve also got car traffic but then we split all the flows of traffic so we’ve got things like police and ambulance coming in the back of the building. All the public comes in the front and all your supply trucks come in separately and so the site the way it’s organized creates a huge opportunity of how we manage traffic flow to the benefit of everybody coming to the site, in particular patients and families.
When you go inside the building, it gets even more exciting and I think probably the biggest benefit is having all private rooms. We’re going to have 641 private rooms in two main towers. Each one of those private rooms will dramatically improve the patient experience. Patients have their own rooms. They have their own washrooms. Their families can stay over. It’s basically like taking a hotel-type setting and putting it into an acute care healthcare complex.
As you go further out of the towers into the main floors (there are) incredible advancements in terms of what we’re doing with surgical suites. When you take a look at the types of surgeries we do today and the amount of technology and the amount of digital platform that goes into it it is daylight and dark compared to what we were doing 25 years ago and so we will build a completely brand new surgical suite system.
And then you have a brand new trauma unit with a helipad that’s on the top of the building and drops patients directly into the emergency department and the trauma units and then we have things like clinics, speciality clinics and then obviously a great new research tower where predominantly all of our main research will be done
Kluke: This an incredible 50 acre site, which is remarkable. Thee new hospital is is really one component, reshaping the future of healthcare and The Ottawa Hospital’s leadership for that.
Maybe Cam you could just share part of your vision of the hospital. This is really important. It’s critical but what are some of the other initiatives at the hospital is doing to to reshape healthcare.
Love: You know over the last 25 years healthcare has shifted dramatically and I think if you look across the planet everybody’s moving towards trying to create a health system. For us, our history has been building a really strong hospital-based system and thankfully we have that today.
As we build this new site, it’ll just advance us even further but what we need to focus on is actually providing care for patients before they get to hospital, when they’re in hospital and when they leave hospital because a large majority of the people in this community that need healthcare episodically in the hospital is a very short period of time.
But they need lots of care before and after, so to that extent we are starting to build more infrastructure around creating a healthcare system that includes things like building long-term care homes, building transitional care units, building community clinics, trying to grow our primary care system, building surgical suites in the community for less acute type outpatient surgeries that can be done very efficiently in a community setting.
They don’t need to come to your main trauma centre and so as you build this infrastructure and we go from sort of 20 sites to 30 sites to 40 sites, what you’re actually creating is a healthcare system that cares for people through their entire trajectory of life.
Kluke: You know 100 years ago in 1924 the community rallied to build the existing Civic which was on the heels of the pandemic (then). Here we are reshaping the future for our city, for the region, and maybe you could just talk about how critical this project is for people in Ottawa and the entire service area of the hospital.
Love: I mean we have we have a growing and we have an aging population and health care is such a key component to any great city and community. Very few communities across Canada get an opportunity to build like we’re building and so the fact that we get to build a brand new healthcare complex that’s a regional trauma centre coupled with advancing what we do for research to to provide better care for the future and then building more infrastructure outside like long-term care and the things I just mentioned.
This is a lifetime opportunity. As you said 100 years ago they built the existing Civic which created, did a trajectory for healthcare; this is the next evolution for the next 50 years and so it couldn’t be any more of an exciting time for healthcare in this community.
Kluke: Thanks, Cam I couldn’t agree more. This is such a generational opportunity for all of us. Join us. We are creating tomorrow.
