New bed facilities priority in WRHA’s five-year plan

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This article was published 14/09/2015 (3798 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new patient bed tower at Health Sciences Centre and renovations to bed spaces at Victoria General Hospital are among the top capital spending priorities identified in a new Winnipeg Regional Health Authority planning document.

Lori Lamont, the WRHA’s interim president and CEO, said she could not predict when a new bed tower might be built at HSC.

Hospital construction is competing with nursing home needs within the region as well as with provincial funding priorities in other parts of Manitoba, she said in a recent interview.

But Health Sciences Centre’s maze of bed facilities, dating to the 1940s and 1950s and perhaps earlier, need to be replaced to improve patient care and address such priorities as reducing wait times and improving infection control, she said.

Lamont said she couldn’t hazard a guess as to how much a new building would cost. Detailed planning for the project is likely to begin within the next five years.

“It would be a large project. It’s our largest hospital,” Lamont said.

Any new structure would contain more private rooms than shared rooms, she said.

As well as being more comfortable, private rooms are more efficient in dealing with patients with complex needs or in battling hospital super bugs. With shared rooms, if a patient needs to be isolated, the second bed goes empty.

“So it reduces temporarily the available beds we have, which has a direct impact on patient flow,” Lamont said.

Inefficiencies on patient wards have a direct impact on waits in emergency departments, which can get clogged when beds are scarce.

Lamont said a decision on where to locate the new patient bed tower will be part of the planning process, although “the goal would be to keep it within the boundary of the Health Sciences Centre campus.”

She said it could be built on an existing surface parking lot, or an older structure could be demolished to make way for it.

In recent years, HSC has built new facilities to house its ER department, critical-care units, operating rooms and high-tech clinics. Next fall, the new Women’s Hospital is to open on the HSC campus.

Lamont said while the old hospital buildings are aging, they’re safe. “The infrastructure is still sound… and there’s no major structural issues.”

But a new building would improve health-care delivery and efficiencies, she said.

At the Victoria hospital, the 1970s vintage bed tower needs updating, rather than replacing, Lamont said.

The WRHA’s board of directors approved the region’s new five-year strategic plan earlier this summer. Other capital projects being eyed include the replacement of some aging personal-care home spaces and the addition of three new nursing homes.

Details are scant, although plans for the new facilities have been in the works for some time. As with hospital construction, the trend is to favour private rather than shared rooms.

The strategic plan for 2016 to 2020 also sets several key operating goals, including improving patient flow within hospitals, finding greater efficiencies and addressing health disparities between different socio-economic groups.

In the area of cost savings, for example, the WRHA will be doing more joint purchases with other Canadian health authorities, Lamont said.

 

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca