Hospital in Sudbury, Ont., pitches province on $3-billion expansion plan

This is a diagram that shows in the color where we are proposing to expand the hospital. It represents about 850,000 square feet of expansion. The key areas of focus are an area we call NeoKids. That's what you see in the green, and that's really about the consolidation of our children's inpatient unit, children's critical care unit, as well as children's mental health in a common location, as well as our children's outpatient services In the purple area, you see a tower that really is where we're planning to consolidate and expand our medical-surgical capacity in the organization. And as we undertake that expansion, we will also be decommissioning a number of the beds that are within the existing North Tower and reconfiguring the North Tower to provide other patient care and inpatient care as well. Where the areas of blue represent really the redevelopment and consolidation of mental health services, we have mental health services that are currently at the Kirkwood site. But our plan is to bring all of the mental health services here on this site for inpatient care and redevelop the existing inpatient mental health unit beds, which are not really up to today's standard of care. So this is a $3 billion project. Talk about that. Yeah, we're in the very early stages of planning. This is 850,000 square feet, so we do rough estimates based on the details of the... The planning documents today, and it's right now estimated in the order of about $3 billion. dollars That's in line with most of the other construction that's happening across the province. How this is phased in is work that we continue to do right now with the Ministry of Health. We are only in early planning stages, and we are looking for approval to move into the next stage of planning, where we actually get you. into much more details of planning. Around the locations of the rooms and the configuration of rooms and the relationship of services to each other and get that blocking on paper. After that, the next phase is doing detailed design. So the next phase of planning is about 12 to 18 months of work. And we're just waiting for ministry approval and alignment. If it does move forward, how long will this project take? Well, we're planning it to 2034, so it's a good 8 to 10 years of construction by the time we see this completed. and And as we contemplate what the needs of the community in Northeast are for 20 to 30 years, we we also are working on those plans, but the focus is on this phase of planning right now are and moving that forward. you.