The end of next month, January 29th and 30th, the city of North Bay ushers in a new era of health care, as patients and staff make the move to the state-of-the-art North Bay Regional Health Centre.
The ultra-modern, 750,000-square foot facility replaces the North East Mental Health Centre, and the North Bay General Hospital's McLaren and Scollard sites, bringing together all of the city's mental health and acute care services under one roof.
The two hospitals – one a regional mental health facility, the other a district acute care facility - have gone one step further by agreeing to amalgamate as one corporate entity with a common board of directors and executive team.
The new hospital has 113 regional mental health beds in nine interconnected lodges and 275 acute care beds. Contemporary principles of design incorporating courtyards and ample windows provide a healing environment, and liberal use of wood – even for structural support – "softens the look of the building," said hospital president and CEO, Mark Hurst.
The design of the mental health facility is radically different from the psychiatric institutions built decades ago.
The entrance to the facility features a Town Centre with a gymnasium and various shops and services where patients can do their banking or have their hair done. The nine lodges feature private rooms and shared dining and kitchen areas.
Self-care, recovery
"The whole emphasis here," said Hurst, "is on self-care, recovery and integration. By co-locating the mental health and acute care facilities, we're taking a big step toward removing the stigma for those who are suffering from mental illness."
The new hospital's emergency room is twice the size of the previous ER and provides patients with considerably more privacy. It has 32 stretchers (twice as many as in the previous location), isolation rooms with negative pressure ventilation systems, a trauma room with ceiling-suspended articulating arms, a four-vehicle, sheltered ambulance bay and a decontamination room for patients involved in chemical, biological or nuclear accidents.
Right next to the ER in a convenient ground floor location is the hospital's outpatient blood collection department, which does a brisk business because of a shortage of private labs in the city.
One major improvement to patient care in the new hospital is the elimination of hallway beds.
"In the General Hospital (the McLaren site), we have 11 hallway beds in our in-patient medical-surgical unit," said Hurst.
"Hallway care is not ideal, but it's better than being in the hustle and bustle of the ER. High occupancies in our medical areas have challenged us to have to provide hallway care, but that won't be necessary in the new facility."
MRI
The acquisition of an MRI is another huge improvement to health care in North Bay. The new MRI, approved by the Ministry of Health in October, will benefit thousands of patients a year who until now have had to travel to Sudbury, Timmins or Orillia for scans.
"We've had about 2,800 MRI scans leave our community every year," said Hurst. "Now, this service will be provided right here." With the Ministry's approval comes $800,000 a year in operating costs, but the MRI itself, which has a price tag of just short of $3 million, will be paid for by the community through a fundraising campaign.
According to Hurst, the total budget for new equipment at the hospital is $30 million.
There are a total of 11 operating rooms, including two in ambulatory care for ophthalmology and urology procedures and one in the birthing unit for C-sections. The ORs are state-of-the-art, providing much improved patient flow, and featuring integrated video communication systems for viewing diagnostic images and video used for image-guided surgery. Ceiling-mounted articulating arms keep equipment and cabling off the floors and there is a clean corridor for the delivery of surgical instruments and supplies.
Critical care
The critical care unit offers patients more privacy and features an isolation room with a negative pressure ventilation system and a nursing station with excellent sightlines.
The one-site facility will allow the hospital to operate much more efficiently. The previous, two-site arrangement created considerable traffic between the McLaren and Scollard sites. Food service, for example, was centralized on one site, requiring the daily transfer of meals.
"There were also a lot of ambulance transfers between the two buildings," said Hurst. "Being under one roof is the right way to go because the resources we're going to have for health care in the future are not going to be at the levels we've been used to."
The North Bay Regional Health Centre was the first hospital in the province to be built under the government's new Alternate Financing and Procurement model, which transfers responsibility to a private sector consortium to build, finance and maintain the facility.
The cost of the new hospital is approximately $1 billion, but that's a deceiving number, said Hurst, because it also covers the cost of financing and maintenance for 30 years.
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