Project to cost $1 billion involves building a brand new hospital
By Agnieszka Krawczynski
The B.C. Catholic
One of the largest Catholic health care organizations in Canada is honouring its past as it looks to the future.
Providence Health Care, which has been around for more than 120 years, has major plans in motion to keep on going.
“It is Providence week,” president and CEO Dianne Doyle told a large crowd of health-care professionals, board members, and others at the annual general meeting June 14.
“This is the week we continue to remind ourselves of the founding congregations and the torch they have passed to us to continue our ministry.”
Sisters of Providence laid the groundwork for the organization when they founded St. Paul’s, a 25-bed, four-storey hospital, in Vancouver in 1894.
The sisters opened a school of nursing in 1907 to help staff the hospital. The organization then continued to expand, opening new hospitals to meet the need.
Providence now runs St. Paul’s Hospital, Mount Saint Joseph Hospital, Holy Family Hospital, and St. John Hospice, as well as an addictions clinic, youth clinic, and several dialysis clinics and residential homes in Vancouver.
“We only accomplish things with and through our people,” said Doyle, who delivered eight awards to health-care professionals, teams, and volunteers for exceptional service to patients and the organization.
The event was themed “forward,” as the organization continues to prepare for a massive change coming to its aging St. Paul’s Hospital.
Last spring Providence announced a $1 billion project to build a brand new hospital on Station Street and move St. Paul’s operations there after more than a century in Vancouver’s West End.
“It’s great to be here at such an important point in our journey,” said Geoff Plant, chairman of the board. He received the organization’s prestigious Good Samaritan award last year for his hand in crafting plans and meeting with the provincial government to discuss them.
The new hospital will include 24/7 primary care, chronic-disease management, mental-health and addictions programs, a low-risk birthing centre, end-of-life care, and community outreach programs. The health-care organization hopes to move into it in 2022.
Shaf Hussain, vice president of communications, told The B.C. Catholic the organization plans to submit a business plan to the Ministry of Health this fall.
“We’ve gone through an initial clinical planning phase that looks at all the health-care programs and services that need to be provided at the new hospital,” he said.
“We’re taking that clinical plan information and translating it into a functional plan and an indicative design that looks at how to deliver the services, how they’re located beside each other, what space we need, how that translates into the kinds of buildings we’ll need.”
Providence is also working with the city of Vancouver to find out what their soon-to-be-neighbours on Station Street have to say. Public information meetings were planned for June 18 and 22.
