Why do we need a new hospital? In order to successfully argue for one, and we’ve been arguing for one in the city for a while, we need to actually answer that question. What need exists that the current facility doesn’t meet? It’s important to answer, because it also sets the tone for how you make the next building.
The building is structurally sound, and while I’m personally not a fan of the layout I haven’t been a fan of any hospital layout that I’ve ever been inside, given that they’re inevitably an infinite array of hallways. But there is a clear problem with the hospital in Yorkton, and one that couldn’t have been anticipated back when it was built in the 1960s. This is a building that isn’t very adaptable.
That makes it solid, a facility that could be used for something when its career as a hospital is inevitably finished. But that also means as more technology, more involved testing and more monitoring is integrated into health care, the current building can barely accommodate it. Look at the hospital at a distance, it looks fine. Look closer and you see a building where any new addition requires an immense amount of creativity to actually have it fit in the building.
It’s becoming clear that the sheer amount of retrofitting that has had to happen in order to keep up with advances in health care is starting to reach its limit. The hospital just wasn’t designed for all this technology, it was born before the majority of the equipment held inside it was even invented, and it honestly shows. Stuff is patched over walls, things are retrofitted in obvious ways. It’s not bad, and it doesn’t make the care worse, but it does show why the building needs to be replaced.
Beyond a new building, what we realize now is that what we need is an adaptable building.
In 50 years, we know that health care will probably look pretty different. The next hospital, if we expect it to last as long as the current one – and we do – has to be designed to change and adapt, in a way that the current hospital was not. You have to have a facility that could be completely renovated for relatively little cost.
That’s also why a new hospital would, eventually, be a way to save money for the province. The initial price tag would be massive, because it’s a hospital and those are expensive no matter what, but if it’s designed properly any subsequent renovation would be much cheaper than renovating the current facility, because it would be designed around the inevitability of renovations. A properly designed new hospital would assume that medical advances would require massive changes to equipment and layout, and it would have to adapt quickly and cheaply.
Beyond that, it would also have to be designed for energy efficiency, which pays for itself in cheaper energy bills, beyond being better for the world around it overall.
The current hospital may have been perfect when it was built, but then things changed, and kept changing, and after so much change it has become clear that there’s a limit to the amount of change the building can handle. If Yorkton does get a new hospital, it has to be a building that can change a great deal in the next half-century.
