"We're on time and on budget so far" Bethesda Expansion rolling along

Anyone driving past the back side of the Bethesda Hospital in the last few weeks would have noticed significant progress on the expansion project. 

The expansion is on the west side of the existing building and can be seen from Hospital Street.  

Kyle MacNair is the Implementation Lead on this project with Southern Health-Santé Sud. He says the structural steel is completed for the basement and main floor, and it’s starting to go up for the second floor. 

“The bones of the building are going up right now, they'll be working at it even today. The concrete has already gone in in the basement and a portion of the main floor and then they'll move on to the second floor and then they'll start with the ceiling deck, sealing the whole building in over the course of the next two to three months.” 

An aerial shot of the Bethesda Hospital expansion project provided by Southern Health

Fortunately, MacNair says there haven’t been any major delays or hiccups as of yet, noting "We're on time and on budget so far".

He adds “the overall temperature for most of the winter has been very conducive to getting quite a bit of work done. So, there haven't been any delays in our general timelines, but they are very long [timelines]. Just to give you a sense, the completion of the project is predicted for late November 2025.” 

And once they get possession of the completed facilities, MacNair says there will still be plenty of work to do before it goes into service.  

“Then we have to do equipment and commissioning and training and all those other things that will take 3-4 months before we're actually looking at opening for patient services, which will be in hopefully the first quarter of 2026, somewhere in that range.” 

All that said, MacNair notes the project will look largely complete to those passing by long before it goes into service. 

"They're going to have the building closed in and probably the external cladding on in 2024, but a lot of the complexity of it is the inside of the building. As you can imagine, there's data cables and oxygen lines and all the mechanical and electrical nurse call systems, all the things that are involved with having a fully functional hospital."

Even though the expansion is far from finished, MacNair notes it is very exciting to see the building take shape.