When will construction on Bethesda Hospital be done?

Construction has been underway at Bethesda Regional Health Centre. 

Kyle McNair, Implementation lead for the clinical and preventative services plan with Southern Health, explains what all this construction is for. 

“There's really two phases to the project. There's the construction of the dialysis unit that's going into the main floor of the community services building on the campus. The other part of construction is the building expansion, so the additional building that's going on campus.” 

He says the dialysis unit is slated for completion later this summer, and should start to take patients in the fall.  

McNair explains the building expansion involves the demolition of some aspects of the current hospital. 

“Because we're connecting these two buildings on two floors, we have to remove pieces of the existing hospital in order to make those connections into the existing hospital.” 

They are currently working on that, and their target is to get the excavation work for starting the main building expansion by mid-July. 

He notes as they've excavated some of the area around the hospital, they've found old parts of buildings that weren't expected to be there. 

“So that's been the only thing that’s run us into a little bit of challenges, is that removal of some of the pieces from the really old parts of the hospital that were demolished in the past,” he says. “But other than that, no major delays, no serious delays. Just running into a few of those construction surprises for the really old parts of the hospital that ended up getting buried as opposed to removed.” 

McNair says once excavation starts for the building expansion in mid-July, they’ll be working on the foundations until around October. 

“And then the structure will be going up by October and into November, December.” 

Meanwhile, further down the street is the project for the parking lot. 

He says the North parking lot work started this spring and they have the goal to complete it by early October. 

“Hopefully so that the staff have powered plug-in spots for parking through the winter because we know it's been tough for staff with the lack of parking at the site. So we're working hard to get this ready before it really gets tough to get into work.” 

As for when the entire construction project will be complete, McNair says it’ll be about September of 2025 

“After that, there'll be a little bit of time that we'll need for commissioning of the site, for some of the work that is done to prep it, so by late 2025 we're hoping to be taking-in patients on the new aspects of the hospital. That's subject to some change, but that's what we're still targeting and that's what we're on track to do.” 

He explains that with the announcement of the three operating rooms that will go on the second floor, that adds a lot of technical, mechanical, and operational pieces to the construction project. 

“We're super excited to have that going into this project, but it does add another dimension of complexity because modern OR facilities have a lot of equipment involved. So it's quite a high-tech project. We're excited that it's part of it, but it has another dimension of design challenges that we're excited to take on.” 

With files from Kenton Dyck