ESTEVAN - The addictions treatment centre at St. Joseph’s Hospital has been a success story since it opened last fall, so much so that it will undergo an expansion a year after it opened.
Planning work has started to expand the centre from its current capacity of 20 beds to 32. Greg Hoffort, the executive director of St. Joseph’s, said they are on track to have the first patient move in as of Oct. 1.
“We’re busy planning the process of expanding the addictions centre to accommodate another 12 patients on a regular basis,” said Hoffort. “We are full to our previously funded occupancy capacity of 20 patients, and we’ve been approved in the last provincial budget to 32 patients.”
The blueprints have been drawn up, the technical side of the expansion is nearing completion and the facility will be expanded by the end of the year.
Four bedrooms will be added to the facility, with two for the end of the male wing and two for the end of the wing for females. Each room in the treatment centre has three bedrooms.
The hospital will also be adding more staff, with addictions counsellors, support workers and other employees such as housekeeping. The added workers will push the total number of employees at the addictions centre to more than 20.
Some of the new staff members have already been hired.
The 12 additional patients will likely be phased in over several weeks, because the hospital can’t have all of the patients arriving at once. It means that one could arrive on Oct. 1, and another would start a few days later, and so on.
The provincial government announced last year that the addictions treatment centre would be returning to St. Joseph’s, more than 20 years after the centre was closed. The first patients arrived in September 2020.
“We’ve been … full, and we’ve been below (capacity),” said Hoffort. “We had a lot of challenges, depending on the different COVID regulations that are imposed. Sometimes it’s taken longer to get to capacity.”
With the isolation periods imposed and a case of COVID-19, it’s been a challenge to get it to capacity, but the centre has been full for some time now.
“With patients coming from other communities, we were very diligent, and had to be, about quarantine and … successive negative testing and things like that,” he said.
Hoffort believes there is enough demand to have twice as many beds as they have now. Even once they have 32 residents, the demand will exceed the number of beds.
“We definitely have seen the benefits and our staff have made a positive influence on the lives of many. There have been a lot of successful … patients that have moved onto the next phase in their recovery.”
The addictions treatment centre also has four pre-treatment and six post-treatment beds.
