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The Chief Executive Officer for South Eastman Health says the construction project at Ste.Anne Hospital is ahead of schedule. Crews broke ground June 3rd on a $14.1 million expansion and renovation project.

The hospital's square footage will increase by 60 per cent.  New facilities will include two rooms for surgeries, one room for scope procedures, a dedicated and adjoining post-anesthesia care unit, a suite of medical device reprocessing rooms for cleaning and sterilizing of all reusable hospital items, a family room, staff change rooms, and new electrical and mechanical space. Another one-third of the hospital will undergo renovation including the existing operating rooms, which will be renovated and converted to provide 5,800 square feet of additional staff support areas.

John Stinson says construction is ahead of schedule. However, Stinson says "we've been doing some piling there that creates some vibration. It's an older hospital so we've had some plaster fall off the walls in the existing operating suites and we need to get that repaired in order to do surgery in there cause you have to be able to wash the walls."

So what does that mean for scheduled surgeries? Stinson says " for the next couple of weeks, we're redirecting surgery from Ste.Anne over to Bethesda so that people won't have to have their surgery cancelled, they'll just be getting it at Bethesda instead of Ste.Anne.

He notes "the biggest concern for us is the inconvenience that it would cause if we had to cancel the surgeries overall until our repairs to the plaster are completed. We didn't want to do that and I really want to thank the regional surgical team for stepping up and Bethesda Hospital for saying no problem let's make this work, how can we help."

Stinson says Ste.Anne does a full slate of surgeries every Tuesday. He notes depending on the complexity of the surgery, it could be six to eight surgeries every Tuesday.

It's expected Ste.Anne Hospital will return to its regular surgery schedule by the third week of September.