HOSPITAL CONSTRUCTION
Toronto clinical tower’s timely completion
In an article first published in Canadian magazine, Canadian Healthcare Facilities, the editor of sister publication, Canadian Facility Management & Design, explains how the completion of a new a 17-storey clinical tower building – the second and largest phase of an ongoing $300 million multi-phase redevelopment at the St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto – was accelerated in the face of increasing demand in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic
A much-anticipated addition to St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto was fast- tracked to keep pace with the pandemic. The Peter Gilgan Patient Care Tower was still in design mode in mid-March 2020, with patients expected to arrive in July that year – the tower itself slated for completion by
summer’s end. A potential surge in coronavirus cases hung on the minds of hospital staff and contractors, who rushed to ready the fourth and seventh floors within weeks, making space for 33 single- patient critical care rooms about three months ahead of schedule.
St. Michael’s Hospital is a Catholic teaching and research hospital founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1892 to care for the sick and poor of Toronto’s inner city. Affectionately known as the ‘Urban Angel’, it is renowned for exceptional patient care. As downtown Toronto’s adult trauma centre, the hospital is a hub for neurosurgery, complex cardiac and cardiovascular care, diabetes and osteoporosis care, minimally invasive surgery, and care of the homeless and disadvantaged. St. Michael’s is also one of the province’s major sites of care for critically ill patients.
New tower ‘eases into existing facility’
An architect’s render showing how the new tower would ‘fit’ seamlessly within the existing hospital complex.
This article, entitled ‘Virus hastens completion of new hospital tower’, originally appeared in the Winter 2020/2021 issue of Canadian Healthcare Facilities, the official publication of the Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society (CHES). HEJ acknowledges the help of the author, Rebecca Melnyk, CHES, and the magazine’s publishers, MediaEdge, for allowing its reproduction, in slightly edited form, here. Rebecca Melnyk is the editor of Canadian Facility Management & Design, another MediaEdge publication.
Replacing an old three-storey parking and storage structure, the new 17-storey glass façade building, The Peter Gilgan Patient Care Tower, eases into the existing facility, linking two older wings that were constructed at different stages in the hospital’s life. Since the new floors were designed for infection control purposes, accelerating them came with opportunities to create capacity, as well as challenges to meet deadlines. Urgent timelines, coupled with a lack of extra equipment and supplies to fit the units, equated to long waits for items like oxygen flowmeters and critical care monitors. Equipment and supplies were scouted and harvested from existing units, says Margaret Moy Lum-Kwong, senior director of Operational Readiness at Unity Health Toronto, (which operates the hospital). There was also little time to train staff and physicians on new technology, fire safety, and emergency egress in the new tower. “This required a compressed orientation and training agenda offered at multiple times during each day over a five-day period, including the weekend, prior to opening,” she says. “Sessions beginning at 8 a.m., with the last (one) ending at 10 p.m. meant long days for the core groups conducting them.”
August 2021 Health Estate Journal 29
Courtesy of NORR Architects & Engineers Ltd
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