A long time coming: Baffin’s new hospital

New equipment, new services, more beds and more space: that’s what Baffin residents will find inside their long-awaited new hospital.

And when the Government of Nunavut is able to hire the staff they’ll need to operate the new equipment and care for patients staying in all those new beds, Baffin residents will gain access to health care services that now exist only in Ottawa.

That’s the plan.

GN officials gave reporters a look at the new hospital structure last month, just a few days after workers and subcontractors hired by SNC-Lavalin turned the building’s lights on and fired up its heating system.

Unlike the Baffin’s old hospital, the new 36-bed structure, covering 5,400 square metres, is dedicated only to patient care.

The health department will use the old hospital building, now connected to the new one by an enclosed walkway, for various support services: cafeteria, storage, offices.

Inside the new building, Baffin residents will find a lot more space and some new health services.

Those new services include chemotherapy equipment, which will be housed at the end of the new building’s emergency wing. Right now, the Baffin region’s many cancer patients must fly to Ottawa to get chemotherapy.

There’s also a big diagnostic imaging room that, in addition to digital X-ray machines, will house equipment for mammography, which looks at breast tissue for any abnormalities — another service that’s never before been available in the Baffin region.

The diagnostic imaging room will not contain an MRI (magnetic resonance imageing) machine, but it’s been built to accomodate one in the future, when the GN can afford to pay for it.

MRI machines use powerful magnetic currents to produce detailed three-dimensional images of the body, including soft tissues that cannot be detected by X-rays.

But they’re expensive: about $2 million a piece. The Government of Nunavut has budgeted only about $5 million to buy all furnishings and equipment at the new hospital. Nearly all of that stuff is now in Iqaluit, having arrived on this summer’s sealift.

A big emergency wing is connected to a trauma centre that will use a variety of live-saving equipment, and to an emergency entrance at the back of the building containing two ambulance bays.

There’s a chapel, a gift shop, a new pediatric ward, two operating theatres, and big, new single-person “birthing” wards that will house obstetric equipment.

The new building also contains a complex network of wires, cables and pipes, including an ethernet system to support digital monitoring terminals and computers everywhere in the building.

GN officials hope the future Qikiqtani General Hospital will start taking patients by May of 2007.

They foresee “substantial completion” by early 2007, followed by regulatory inspections and a complex transition plan that will see patient care shifted to the new structure over a period of time.

By then, the GN and the building’s developer, a numbered company owned by the Qikiqtaaluk Corp., may also have figured out who will actually own the building.

When that happens, they’ll have completed a long, convoluted process that began in 1988, when the federal government finished devolving responsibility for health care to the Government of the Northwest Territories.

The federal-territorial health-devolution deal provided for a replacement hospital in Iqaluit. Iqaluit’s first hospital, built in the early 1960s, was aging even then.

The GNWT didn’t pursue the idea until after the 1995 territorial election, when they modified it to provide for two new regional health centres, or mini-hospitals, in Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay.

But the three-building, three-region project didn’t go forward until after years of wrangling over money, contracts, and building design, a process that involved the now-defunct health boards, regional Inuit birthright corporations, and two territorial governments.

The Auditor General of Canada, Sheila Fraser, exerted a powerful influence on the process too. In her 2001 report on the GN’s finances, Fraser lambasted the territorial government for entering into long-term leases that often cost the public more than the buildings are worth.

The three hospital construction projects were originally conceived by the GNWT as lease-back arrangements: the regional birthright corporations would build them, and the territorial government would lease them back.

But with Fraser’s criticisms ringing in their ears, GN officials analyzed each of the three deals, leaving open the option of government ownership for each new building.

Even at this late date, however, GN officials still cannot say who will “own” the Qikiqtani General Hospital, though they appear to be moving towards a deal with QC that would give ownership to the government.

To pay for the new hospital, the GN budgeted the following amounts:

* Construction of main building: $35. 7 million;
* Furnishings and equipment: $5 million
* Renovations to old hospital building: amount unknown, but estimated at about $5 million.

The GN completed its development agreement with QC in May of 2004. Around the same time, SNC-Lavalin, a major construction company from Quebec, was awarded the construction contract, and site preparation began in the summer of that year.