Downtown St. Paul's Hospital on the move to False Creek Flats | News

[mr.x]

Downtown Vancouver hospital move draws fire
Last Updated: Monday, April 2, 2007 | 11:58 AM PT
CBC News

The battle over moving St. Paul's Hospital from downtown Vancouver to the False Creek Flats near the train station is heating up.

The coalition that is trying to keep the busy downtown hospital at its current location on Burrard Street says the decision to move has already been made, despite promises to hold community consultations.

It claims that hospital staff were told by Providence Health Care last month the plans to move have been finalized.

Save St. Paul's Coalition spokesman Aaron Jasper told a public forum Sunday the public consultations should have happened before any preliminary plans were made.

"Any consultation that takes place after the decision is not consultation, it's a sales pitch. If this was to be meaningful consultation, it should have been done before a decision was made, [and] incorporate that feedback into the business case."

But Neil McConnell of Providence Health Care, who attended the forum, said the plans to move have not been finalized.

"Well, I tried to be very very clear. There's has been no decision relative to the hospital. And before we do that, we'll have public consultations to inform the business case. We'll rewrite it if we have to."

McConnell says the public consultations will take place in the spring and summer.

The current plan calls for part of the current St. Paul's site to be redeveloped for commercial and residential use.

Some services including urgent, primary and secondary care would also continue to be offered at the downtown location.

About 100 people attended the forum.




The location at the False Creek Flats is this huge field:
http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m20/carsenchant/VGHSite.jpg

[Plumber73]

St. Pauls doesn't look like it would hold up very well in an earthquake, but who knows? Hospitals should be one of the most earthquake resistant buildings in the city in my opinion. I'm not sure what the argument is for keeping it there. Location perhaps?

[mr.x]

Downtown is home to what is now approaching to 100,000 residents. wouldn't you think it needs its own hospital like how it needs its own elementary and secondary schools?

i support a new False Creek Flats hospital, but i still think we need a downtown hospital. Perhaps they could downsize St. Paul's but still keep some emergency wards, etc. instead of turning it into just a clinic and the new Flats hospital could be built smaller and they could leave room for future expansion.

[Vanlaw]

^^^^^ Couldn't agree more. The FC Flats is a great idea, but not at the expense of St. Pauls. Downtown needs a central hospital, and considering it is the main location in Vancouver for HIV treatment, it doesnt seem like a smart move to shut it down.

[alta-bc]

I would image only the oldest portion of St. Paul's would be shut down. The St. Paul's Hospital complex has some modern sections to it, like palliative care and HIV treatment. These sections are quite large and I doubt those would be affected.

[mr.x]

^^^^^ Couldn't agree more. The FC Flats is a great idea, but not at the expense of St. Pauls. Downtown needs a central hospital, and considering it is the main location in Vancouver for HIV treatment, it doesnt seem like a smart move to shut it down.

Especially being so near the prime gay community.

[mr.x]

Providence Health Care set to replace hospital with $950m LEED gold facility adjacent to Pacific Central Station

Peter Mitham

The hospital that replaces St. Paul’s promises to be an ultra-green development on False Creek Flats.

Providence Health Care is planning a new hospital of up to 1.4 million square feet adjacent to Pacific Central Station, on a 18.4-acre site acquired in 2004. Current designs target gold certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard, although platinum certification is the ideal.

The city’s National Works Yard in the same area has a LEED gold rating, and Providence, the largest Roman Catholic health services organization in Canada, wants to meet or exceed that standard in its own facilities.

“We’ll be pushing the envelope to make things better and be sustainable,” said Neil MacConnell, Providence vice-president responsible for Providence Legacy Projects. “We would expect our building to be, at minimum, gold and hopefully platinum.”

Speculation has surrounded Providence’s plans for the hospital, currently located in a 1912-era complex on Burrard Street in downtown Vancouver. Under the terms of the Providence Legacy Project, Providence wants to redevelop the original hospital to better serve the needs of patients on the downtown peninsula.

Providence has retained renowned green architects Busby Perkins + Will and engineering firm Stantec to design the new facility, which could cost upwards of $950 million to build, not including equipment costs.

Green features include not only transit connections, maximum use of natural light and low energy consumption, but also natural ventilation systems that promise to enhance the hospital’s abilities to control infections.

The hospital’s redevelopment would generate significant operating cost savings.

Based on a current operating budget of approximately $280 million a year, those savings could amount to as much as $31.2 million annually.

“It’s the redesigned system that’s going to give the greatest benefit in health care to the public of British Columbia,” MacConnell said. “Not just all of the technical things that you get from LEED.”

A May 3 briefing document states that developing a new hospital on the Station Street site would yield the biggest savings.

“The preferred option for the Legacy Project is to develop a new facility at Station Street while continuing to provide services for the West End residents from the existing St. Paul’s site,” the document states, noting that an expansion on Station Street would be “approximately 36% more cost effective, mostly due to expected operating cost efficiencies.”

The scale of the hospital proposed for Station Street leaves room for additional development.

Schroeder Properties Ltd. previously envisioned a 2.4 million-square-foot high-tech office park on the site, but Providence’s plans call for a development that’s one million square feet smaller. That would create potential opportunities for residential or commercial development that complements the hospital’s mandate.

“We believe that there’s extra space, so there’s flexibility for us for the future, and there’s also the ability for us to partner from a land development perspective with others,” MacConnell said.

He added that Providence also plans redevelopment for the Burrard Street property. Should the redevelopment proceed on Station Street, the health-care services that would remain at the 6.7-acre Burrard Street location would require a small portion of the current hospital site.

“We could house all of that, most likely, in the heritage component of the site, and redevelop the remainder of the site,” MacConnell said. “Any money that we make from the redevelopment of the [Burrard Street] site gets folded into helping us rebuild at the Station Street site. It helps reduce the cost to the taxpayer.”

Partnerships BC, which co-ordinates public-private partnerships in the province and was recently charged with reviewing all capital projects requiring more than $20 million in provincial funding, would likely vet any provincial contribution.

Should the project proceed as a P3, contractors are waiting in the wings to bid for a project that could take from four to 15 years to develop (redeveloping the existing site would require more time than building from scratch). But Dale Burghall, business development manager with PCL Constructors Westcoast Ltd., doesn’t expect contractors will be vying for the work before 2010.

Indeed, MacConnell said that no decision on the project’s location has been made and that whichever project is chosen will require government approval. Providence hopes to complete public consultations this year and will then revisit its business case for the project.

MacConnell doesn’t see construction beginning until 2010, at the earliest, noting that construction costs and labour demand may have stabilized by then, resulting in a less volatile development environment.

[DrT]

Good strategy on the part of Providence Health. I am happy that the heritage component in the Burrard facility will be kept. Waiting until AFTER the Olympic building frenzy will probably be consired now by more developers now as construction capacity is maxed.

[Overground]

I really like the idea of the heritage part remaining and sustaining medical services for people downtown, albeit much smaller. The transit connections are brilliant for the new location with Skytrain already there and the future streetcar.

What would be interesting in the future is if the streetcar would be extended into the West End via Beach. That way West Enders would have an easier transit option to get to the new facility.

[mr.x]

A big thanks to jlousa for getting this rendering of the proposed hospital on the False Creek Flats, it's really impressive:

http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p155/jlousa/StPauls.jpg


even though i do support the existing St. Paul's because of its central location, i do have to say this proposal is quite tempting. i didn't think they would be building anything this big.

hopefully they'll save Future Development 1 and 3 for future hospital expansions rather than selling it, we need more future hospital space with VGH filling up and a growing and aging population.

[mr.x]

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/8391/82111541tv0.png

[spongeg]

looks like a win win situation

[EastVanMark]

^^ It really does. For once it seems that the big picture is being looked at. 2 facilities will service the community as a whole that much better.:okay:

[nova9]

So if it now we're ending with a win-win scenario, how did we initially start with the whole "St. Paul is shutting down" conversation? Do we know if this was what was originally planned?

[spongeg]

i think inititally it was that st pauls was gong to leave burrard and move and it was assumed that meant full closure of the burrard hospital

[aberrate]

So as of right now St. Paul's hospital will crumble in a strong earthquake? Get this project going already!

[officedweller]

Good news