Picco: New hospitals to open by 2004

IQALUIT — Within three years, pregnant women in the Kitikmeot won’t have to travel south to deliver their babies. Patients needing minor surgery will stay in Rankin Inlet. And, in Iqaluit, the aging Baffin Regional Hospital will be modernized.

By fall of 2004, two new mini-hospitals and an improved Baffin Regional Hospital will open their doors.

Ed Picco, Nunavut’s health minister, said construction of regional health centres in Cambridge Bay and Rankin Inlet is on schedule, as is work on a new wing for the Baffin Regional Hospital.

Somewhat reluctantly, Picco divulged what he called the “tentative” dates the hospitals will open: September 2002 for Cambridge Bay, June 2004 for Rankin Inlet, and November 2004 for the Baffin Regional Hospital.

That is, Picco said, “if all our ducks line up.”

Site work has already begun in Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay.

The facilities won’t be “glorified health centres,” Picco said. “We’ll have teaching facilities. They won’t be just four walls … and to fix the tonsillectomies.”

Site studies have been completed on the proposed location of the new Baffin hospital wing, but there are no signs of work.

Iqaluit’s hospital urgently needs upgrading. The current facility, built in 1962, is showing potentially dangerous signs of age and can’t accommodate new technology or equipment.

But Picco said the City of Iqaluit hasn’t yet zoned the site or issued a building permit.

Groundbreaking is set for the end of October, but if the city doesn’t issue the necessary permits, groundbreaking may not happen till next spring.

Picco said concerns over the site’s location, downhill from Iqaluit’s reservoir, should be allayed by a recently completed study.

He said the analysis put the likelihood of the hospital being swept away by an overflow of the reservoir at one in seven million.

The total cost the new facilities will be between $80 and $90 million. The two regional health care centres will cost $15 million each, while the new Iqaluit hospital wing will cost about $30 million, plus $20 million for renovations and improvements.

The regional birthright development corporations will pay to construct the hospitals, and then lease them back to the government to recover their investment.

The GN chose this “design, build, lease” option because money once earmarked to build Iqaluit’s hospital was spent on other projects.