"I think this is great for the people of South Eastman and we're very excited to finally be underway on this." Those are the words of John Stinson, Chief Executive Officer for South Eastman Health. Stinson says "we finally got approval from Manitoba Health to award the tender for the renovation piece on the main floor of the Community Services Building to create the temporary ER. And that's really good news for us."

Stinson says there were eight bids. The winning bid goes to Penn-Co Construction of Blumenort at $2.16 million. Stinson says that's 40% higher than what was budgeted. "That's always a concern for us. But we're hoping that as we move forward and we move to the main project we're going to be able to control some of the cost."

Work is scheduled to begin over the next six weeks. "It's about a three month project," says Stinson. "You know things always go wrong when you're doing projects like this. I mean if anyone's renovated a house you know that you find things behind walls or you find things you don't anticipate. But our timeline is three months but it's probably going to take closer to four."

Stinson says this initial project won't create disruptions for patients using the hospital. "But once the temporary ER is in place they're going to come to the Community Services Building, the old personal care home. And that's where they'll go for emergency and signs will redirect them there." Stinson says the temporary ER will actually be twice the size of the existing ER.

Meanwhile, Stinson is now hoping the rest of the ER expansion project will go to tender in the next month with a Spring start.

It was in 2007 the initial approval was given for this project. Stinson says though they've been anxiously awaiting shovel in the ground, "I say to people this is a significant project, it takes a long time to work out the details on this stuff. And things happen that are beyond anyone's control. So there's no evil plot to delay this, it's just been a victim of circumstance in some of the delays that we've faced."