A preliminary conceptual plan for new hospitals in Yorkton and Canora have been unveiled to the public.
Not surprisingly, Yorkton's current facilities were deemed unsuited to facilitate the kind of growth expected locally, said Cannon Design Vice President Mark Vaughan at a public meeting in the city last week. Cannon Design is the firm hired to develop plans for the new buildings. The buildings in both Yorkton and Canora were termed "functionally obsolete" due to undersized rooms, inefficient floor plans, a lack of adequate support and storage space, and a lack of an electronic medical record.
Renovating the buildings was considered as an option, but as this approach would require "totally gutting" the Yorkton Regional Health Centre and surrounding buildings, Cannon concluded that building new is a better option. A new structure would cost just six per cent more than renovating the old, said Associate Vice President Troy Ransdell, and would offer lower long-term maintenance costs and a smoother transition of services.
While renovation had to be a consideration, it comes as no surprise the buildings are not viable for such an undertaking. The Yorkton hospital is decades old at its heart and has gone through renovations over the years, leaving the current hospital a bit of a jigsaw puzzle in terms of what it is today.
And, when it comes to old buildings, the concern with renovations are the unseen upgrades needed once you pull back the finishing and see what's behind the walls. Anyone that doubts that need only look back at renovations at the Gallagher Centre.
So we must build new. And the replacement building should offer much of what the current facility lacks, and that is room for growth.
If we take a look at the successful dialysis program now at the health centre, there is no doubt a need to expand the programming, but room is an issue.
The new hospital must not only accommodate the growth of the city, and region, but should have the scale to allow for program growth.
That of course is the unknown question in the ongoing process.
We can look forward to the future with some expectation of continued population growth. The only unknown is the scale and timing of the growth which are reliant on things such as potash industry expansion and development.
The other unknown is the role regional hospitals will play in terms of the overall provincial health services system in the years ahead.
That role has always seemed somewhat fuzzy as the idea of regional health care seems at times lost on a Saskatoon/Regina focus for services, an issue made worse by the difficulty of attracting medical specialists to smaller centres.
The local plan could be made easier if the structure of regional hospitals were more clearly defined.
And then there is the cost. The facility would have an estimated construction cost of $276-293 million, excluding land and furnishing costs; based on the provincial government's 80/20 funding formula, this would put the municipality's share of that price tag at about $55-59 million.
The price is likely nearer the higher end based on how most project go these days, and that means a sizable provincial investment is required.
It also means a huge investment locally. Even with a trading area of 50,000, $60 million equates to $1,200 per person, and does not take into account the projected work at Canora.
The project of course has merit, and now has a conceptual plan to galvanize around, but there are still a myriad of unanswered questions, along with political and financial hurdles to overcome before a new hospital will be a reality.
