Janice Perrino, executive director of the South Okanagan Medical Foundation, spoke to the Rotary Club of Osoyoos about plans for Penticton Regional Hospital. (Richard McGuire photo)
If you have a spare $10 million to donate, the new patient care tower at Penticton Regional Hospital could be named after you.
Janice Perrino, executive director of the South Okanagan Medical Foundation, presented that option at a recent meeting of the Rotary Club of Osoyoos. There were no immediate takers.
In a talk that was part sales pitch and part update on the hospital makeover, the effervescent Perrino shared her excitement about the $325 million project expected to break ground in early May.
Perrino’s foundation is raising $20 million toward the project, mainly to pay for new medical equipment.
“The medical foundation stood forward and said we’ll pick up $20 million,” she said, adding that by buying the equipment, this would allow the foundation to choose the equipment it wants.
The provincial government is contributing $183 million and the Okanagan Similkameen Regional Health District is providing $122 million, she said.
Admitting the $10 million donation might be a little ambitious for the Osoyoos Rotary Club, Perrino suggested that for a $30,000 contribution over four years, the club could have a room named in its honour.
This, a few Rotarians acknowledged, might be more achievable since the club has already been earmarking funds for the hospital project.
“We have $20 million to raise and we have 91,000 reasons,” said Perrino, referring to the population throughout the Okanagan-Similkameen that will be served by the expanded hospital. “Every single one of us is a reason, because you may not ever think you’re going to need a hospital and you may not want to go to a hospital, but I can promise you that every one of us will use a hospital.”
So far, she said, the medical foundation has raised more than $6 million in cash and more than $10 in cash and pledges combined.
Perrino noted that the existing hospital was built in 1953 to serve a population of just 10,500 people.
That, she said, was before the development of the polio vaccine, before the spread of television, and before the invention of ultrasound scans, CT scans and MRIs.
The major development will expand the emergency department by four times its current size.The 26,700 square-metre size of the project is three times the size of Penticton’s South Okanagan Events Centre, she said.
In January, the project was awarded to EllisDon, which will be building and managing it as a P3 project – a public-private partnership.
EllisDon designs the building and builds it on time and on budget or they pay a penalty. They then manage the building for 30 years, with management renewed every five years thereafter.
“It’s in the management of the facility for the next 30 years where they really make their money back,” said Perrino.
The project will be constructed in two phases with the first phase, the patient care tower, scheduled for completion in late 2019.
There will also be a 500-stall parkade constructed, as well as a medical school on the basement level, she said.
The second phase involves renovation and expansion of the emergency department and support services to be completed in late 2020. The current lobby area, she said, will all become emergency rooms.
Despite the addition of 84 private bedrooms, the expansion will only bring a net increase in beds of about 20, said Perrino.
That’s because many of the existing 147 beds won’t be kept. Some will be decommissioned, and in other cases four-bed rooms will be reduced to two-bed rooms and two-bed rooms will be reduced to singles.
Perrino pointed out that many procedures that once kept a patient in hospital for days or more are now done overnight or as day surgery.
“We do 80 per cent of our surgeries as day surgeries,” she said. “You don’t need to be in hospital for the day surgeries and that’s why we don’t need the beds.”
It’s also been found that patients who are kept in beds heal much faster when they don’t have to share a room, she said.
The hospital also doesn’t want to keep seniors in long-term beds where they languish, she said.
Perrino noted that Interior Health has hired 30 new specialists in the South Okanagan in the past three years and now has 190 doctors and 80 specialists in the South Okanagan and Similkameen area.
Starting in July 2016, the hospital will be training four new University of British Columbia medical students in the Family Medicine Program and adding an addition of four in 2017, she said.
Perrino said she hopes that medical residents trained in the South Okanagan will become enthused to stay in the area.
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
